
Copyiiglit})^ 



COFHMGHT DEPOSm 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 
AND HIS COLLEGE 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 
AND HIS COLLEGE 



BY 



^ 



FREDERICK P. KEPPEL 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1917 



v3^ 



'i%\ 



COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY FREDERICK P. KEPPKL 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

J^ublished November iQtj 



I.L 



a 



OEC -i 1917 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY 

I. Introduction i 

II. Present-Day Types of College .... 37 

THE STUDENT AND THE COLLEGE 

III. The Raw Materlal 67 

IV. The Undergraduate Point or View. . . 92 
V. Student Organizations ...... 130 

VI. Athletics . . . 157 

VII. Religion and Morals 181 

VIII. Intellectual Life 195 

IX. The Finished Product 216 

THE COLLEGE AND THE STUDENT 

X. Organization , .235 

XI. Educational Administration 270 

XII. Teaching and Teachers 299 

XIII. Conclusion 324 



THE UNDERGRADUATE 
AND HIS COLLEGE 

CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 

The people of the United States in times of peace 
lay aside for investment annually something over two 
billion dollars, and, although they are willing to take 
a ** flier" now and then, they usually look with con- 
siderable care into the probable chances for dividends. 
They make another investment of at least equal im- 
portance, the years of youth given to general study 
after the age of possible earning has arrived. Its im- 
portance is not in the money cost, which is more than 
ten million dollars annually, but in time. Money can 
be replaced, but never these years. Our collegiate 
students in any year number well over two hundred 
thousand. No other nation in the world makes so 
heavy an investment in this particular field. 

And yet it may be questioned whether there is any 
field in which we invest so carelessly, where the ig- 
norance of half-knowledge is more widespread. Not 



2 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

that there is any lack of definite views upon the sub- 
ject of college education. If I, for example, were to 
tell my lawyer or doctor or banker friends how to con- 
duct their affairs, with the same quiet but absolute 
assurance which they almost uniformly adopt in ad- 
vising me about my particular business as a college 
dean, they would stare at me in blank amazement. 
Their advice is sincere enough and given with the best 
intentions in the world, but unfortunately it is based 
on the hazy and distorted memories of an undergrad- 
uate life of twenty years ago or more, — a Hf e different 
in unsuspected ways from that of to-day, — or upon 
the headlines of newspaper controversies, or possibly 
on distressing experiences with some of our less suc- 
cessful or less t3^ical academic products of recent 
years. 

I do not mean that much criticism is not justified. 
Heaven knows that it is. Unfortunately people as- 
sume that education must of necessity be good edu- 
cation, whereas the contrary is often the case. A for- 
mer dean of the Columbia Law School once told me of 
a talk he had with one of his students. "I know both 
your father and your mother,'^ he said, "and with the 
kind of mental equipment that they must have given 
you, I cannot understand how you have succeeded in 
failing so completely." "You forget,'' said the young 
man, "that I put in four years at (naming a 



INTRODUCTION 3 

fashionable college), and that in those four years I 
naturally lost any habits of industry and powers of 
concentration that I possessed when I entered.'^ 

This book will attempt neither to arraign nor to 
whitewash the present-day American college for men, 
but to bring together some information about it which 
may be useful to prospective investors of their own 
time or that of their children. 

Any conclusions that I may venture to draw will be 
of a very general nature, and as you read I hope you 
will credit me with a willingness at all times to admit 
the virtues of your particular college and the equally 
conspicuous vices of its rival. Such merit as the col- 
lection of material may have will be due to the fact 
that most of it has come directly or indirectly from the 
undergraduates themselves. So far as possible I have 
tried to write from their point of view rather than 
from that of the professional educator. 

Too often, both within academic walls and outside 
of them, the students are looked upon as the inert 
material of this industry, to be experimented upon, 
moulded, and fashioned. As a matter of fact, the stu- 
dents are the College, the Collegium, In the Middle 
Ages they often selected and paid their teachers, and 
although no longer having that responsibility, they 
must be recognized as a himian factor at least of equal 
importance with teachers and trustees. What they 



4 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

lack in experience they make up in that complex of 
energy and enthusiasm, of curiosity and aspiration, 
which is youth. Their great numbers mean a wide 
range in quaHty, and the group of students constitut- 
ing the best quarter of the whole furnishes a most 
important factor in the life of any institution. 

What is the American college? Where did it come 
from? and Whither is it bound? I shall try to answer 
the questions in the order of their increasing difficulty, 
starting with the second and ending with the third. 

The pre-Revolutionary beginnings of collegiate edu- 
cation in this country are famihar enough to us all. 
Beginning with Harvard in 1636 and Yale (founded 
sixty-five years later as a protest against the radicalism 
of Harvard and to preserve the true Puritan ideals), 
ten colleges sprang up along the Atlantic Seaboard, 
built more or less closely upon the contemporary 
English collegiate model and usually under the direct 
care of some religious denomination or sect. It is sig- 
nificant, however, that the charter of Brown Univer- 
sity, although requiring its trustees to be Baptists, 
enacted and declared that "into this Uberal and cath- 
olic Institution shall never be admitted any religious 
tests: But on the contrary, all the Members hereof 
shall forever enjoy full, free, absolute, and uninter- 
rupted Liberty of Conscience." Local pride was, of 
course, a factor in the establishment and growth of 



INTRODUCTION 5 

these colleges, then as now. According to the pub- 
lished list of birthdays, nineteen new colleges came 
into being between 1776 and 1800. The oldest State 
university — that of North Carolina — was founded 
in 1793. The powerful influence of Yale is reflected in 
the fact that the first presidents of Princeton, Colum- 
bia, Dartmouth, Williams, and Middlebury were all 
Yale men. 

What is not so familiar is the fact that, although the 
early institutions have determined very largely the 
path which they and their successors were to follow, 
they were not colleges in the sense in which we use 
the word to-day, but elementary boarding-schools, as 
were the English colleges upon which they were mod- 
eled. Boys entered at a very tender age, many well- 
known Americans having been graduated at fourteen 
or fifteen years, or even younger. The curriculum was 
really an elementary curriculum in spite of certain 
high-sounding titles. In the interesting Bogart Let- 
ters, written from Rutgers College during the Revo- 
lution, it is amusing to see the references to beginner's 
Greek and elementary arithmetic for collegians. The 
youngsters were bedded and boarded, as well as 
taught, and were held under a set of rules of great 
complexity; rules evidently not followed very scrupu- 
lously, however, if one may judge from the elaborate 
systems of fines and other punishments which appear 



6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

in the early statutes. In a word, they were secondary 
schools enjoying the repute of institutions of higher 
learning only by grace of the fact that there was 
nothing beyond in the educational system of the com- 
munity. I do not mean to imply that there was no 
intellectual hf e. Considering their youthful years and 
the slight help from the faculty, the amount of serious 
reading and solid thinking which some of those young- 
sters performed should put many a college student of 
to-day to shame. 

The chief significance of this background to-day lies 
not in its influence upon the course of study, — for the 
course of study has always changed as soon as envi- 
ronmental pressure became sufficiently strong, and 
always will, — but in the fundamental attitude of the 
college toward the student, and of the student toward 
his environment. College life as we have it to-day in 
the United States is fundamentally a secondary-school 
life, based upon the assumption that the student's 
mind is too immature for a mental load heavy enough 
to absorb more than a very moderate share of his time 
and energy. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say, that 
assimiption is no longer made, but the tradition has 
been accepted. 

Later on I shall try to show how the disorderly ac- 
tivities directed against teachers or authorities in gen- 
eral have come to be transferred into the elaborate 



INTRODUCTION 7 

organization of the present-day college life as an outlet 
for superfluous youthful energy. The football hero and 
the manager of the college daily are the legitimate de- 
scendants of the miscreants who hoisted the cow into 
the college belfry a century ago. If we want to find the 
nearest thing to our conventional college life across the 
Atlantic, we must go, not to Oxford or Cambridge, but 
to Harrow or Rugby. That may be one reason why 
"Tom Brown at Rugby" interests us Americans and 
"Tom Brown at Oxford" is likely to bore us. 

Of course it will not do to press this point of histori- 
cal background too far, but it seems to me to serve 
more completely than anything else as an answer to 
the question which so often arises to our own Hps, and 
even oftener to those of outsiders, as to why grown 
mfen do these particular things, or, if the question is 
more carefully framed, how they can see things in 
these particular proportions. 

It has been the fashion recently to say that the early 
colleges were really vocational schools, and that what 
may have been an appropriate vocational training for 
colonial clergymen we have blindly come to accept 
as the best liberal culture for all. The statement con- 
tains a grain or two of truth, but a study of the bio- 
graphical records of even the earliest graduates fails to 
show that a preponderating percentage entered the 
ministry. 



8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Whether it was a result of what they were taught in 
the colleges or because, as seems more likely, the boys 
theniselves were of select stock, the colonial colleges 
did their full share in the work of the American Revo- 
lution and in the building of the Constitution. From 
the graduates of WilKam and Mary came Jefferson, 
Monroe, and Marshall, and from Kings (Columbia), 
Hamilton, Morris, Livingston, and Jay. 

From 1800 to the Civil War two hundred and 
twenty-two more colleges were established, and in 
1870, when college statistics were first published by 
the United States Bureau of Education, there were 
in ail 37,346 undergraduate students. The institutions 
were still largely under the guidance and control of the 
clergy, though the proportion of graduates entering 
that calling was falling rapidly. Some few had de- 
veloped professional schools in addition to the colle- 
giate department, and across the Alleghanies girls had 
from the first been admitted to the classes upon the 
same terms as boys. 

Such changes in curriculum and policy as developed 
were due to the presence of some outstanding person- 
ahty in a particular college rather than to any general 
intellectual ferment within or pressure from without, 
and such innovations as were made at particular col- 
leges were not very generally imitated elsewhere. 
Reversion to type after the passing away of the domi- 



INTRODUCTION 9 

nating personality was the rule rather than the ex- 
ception. 

The great figures of this period were Thomas Jeffer- 
son, who made the University of Virginia the intel- 
lectual plaything of his declining years, and who em- 
bodied in its organization many of the ideas which he 
learned during his youthful residence in France; Eliph- 
alet Nott, at Union, who broke away from the pre- 
vailing policy of the minute regulation of students; and 
Francis Wayland, at Brown, who was one of the first 
to look upon matters of curriculum with a discerning 
eye. The early presidents at Michigan were strong 
men, and the influence of this first of the state imiver- 
sities to come to prominence was felt in the East as 
well as in the West. Mark Hopkins, at Williams, is 
generally included in any list of major educational 
prophets, largely, perhaps, because of his picturesque 
association with the hypothetical log; but aside from 
the strong personal power he had over his students, he 
seems to have contributed relatively little to the de- 
velopment of the American college. 

In the second quaxter of the century, a fundamental 
influence began to be exerted by the trickling stream of 
American wanderers returning from the German uni- 
versities, most of whom settled down as college teach- 
ers. Between 181 5 and 1850, two hundred and twenty- 
five Americans studied in German universities, and 



lo THE UNDERGRADUATE 

one hundred and thirty-seven of them became teachers 
in American colleges. 

The age of students was generally rising, probably 
because of the poorer equipment of the schools in the 
newer districts, and of the older students coming back 
to college after emplojrment (usually as district-school 
teachers), and with this increase in age the disciplinary 
problems must have changed in character. The school- 
boy attitude, however, persisted, and the statutes still 
were made up mainly of rules of order, with minute 
prescriptions as to reward and punishment. Edward 
Everett Hale's diary, kept when he was a student at 
Harvard in the thirties, is a very interesting document, 
and in nothing more interesting than as revealing the 
entire lack of sympathy and confidence between the 
college administration and the students. Athletics of a 
more or less orderly kind were emerging, but they were 
spontaneous activities of the boys themselves, without 
any of the present-day stimulation from alumni and 
the public at large. 

It is common to hear old men bewail the falling-off in 
intellectual interests from these ante-bellum days, but as 
a matter of fact the amount and the quality of academic 
work have been probably greatly over-estimated; for 
the common experiences of the students in those days 
were largely those of the classroom, and the recollec- 
tions of alumni are likely to be similarly limited/ 



INTRODUCTION ii 

The general national shake-up which resulted from 
the Civil War doubtless extended its influence even to 
the sequestered college campus. At any rate, the mod- 
ern period began shortly thereafter, with all its devel- 
opments for good and ill. Up to then the colleges had 
been fed in general from families of the conforming 
type, from the more or less established classes, with 
some background, at any rate, of culture. From now 
on an influx of more radical stock had to be reckoned 
with. 

The new demands caused by the growing needs of 
the country effected a revolution in its educational 
system. This movement meant, temporarily at least, 
the loss to the colleges, in large numbers, of boys of 
ambition and energy, who did not seek or who failed 
to find what they wanted in the old-fashioned college 
curriculum. The first engineering school — Rensselaer 
— had been founded in 1824, but it found few imita- 
tors until after the Civil War, when these schools in- 
creased very rapidly. Schoolboys were hurried directly 
into these and also into institutions of law, medicine, 
and the like, which were professional at least in name, 
and in which the work and atmosphere were wholly 
different from those of the college. The engineering 
schools, on the other hand, "were not founded by 
engineers as the outgrowth of an apprenticeship sys- 
tem, but by college professors who sought to satisfy 



12 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

industrial needs by the methods to which they were 
accustomed in the colleges.'* For this reason no sharp 
line was drawn, many of the subjects of study were 
identical, and the students to this day make no dis- 
tinction in their social relations. Indeed, the United 
States Commissioner of Education does not attempt to 
separate the two classes of students in his reports. 
President Hopkins, of Dartmouth, has recently 
pointed out that the "Kberal colleges, with all other 
types of educational institution, owe the technical 
schools a great debt of gratitude for their insistence 
upon the scientific method in the approach to scholar- 
ship." 

The combined crudity and virility of the state uni- 
versities of the period was affecting in larger and larger 
measure the academic community as a whole, not only 
in academic matters, — particularly the admission of 
new subjects of study, — but the students and their 
attitude. 

Largely under the leadership of Barnard at Colum- 
bia and of Eliot at Harvard, there began a general 
breakdown in the minute oversight of students, with 
its accompaniment of disciplinary legislation and ad- 
ministration, but as yet there was little attempt to 
substitute anything else as a controlling factor in the 
lives of the students. It was only after much labor on 
the part of these two leaders and a few others like 



INTRODUCTION 13 

them, including the group which President Gihnan 
gathered around him at the foundation of Johns Hop- 
kins in 1876, that there came to be any glimmering in 
the academic mind of the possible vitalizing influence 
of modern scholarship upon the student body. Con- 
currently with this dawning Ught on the part of the 
teachers came a new type of student, better prepared 
to appreciate his opportunities than were many of the 
old American stock. These newcomers were the sons 
of European immigrants who came to America after 
the revolutions of '48 to seek intellectual and moral 
freedom. There were also immigrants of the first gen- 
eration, of whom there were only a handful at first, 
but who came and were still coming in constantly in- 
creasing numbers till the outbreak of the great war. 

As a counterbalancing factor to this highly desirable 
type of college student came the sons of our own idle 
rich, for little by little it was becoming the fashion to 
go to college. Professor John W. Burgess was called 
to Columbia College from Amherst in 1876, and in a 
reminiscent article, recently published, he gives an in- 
teresting picture of the contrast between the old New 
England college, where these fashionable influences 
had not begun to operate, and the city institution : — 

I came to the old institution within the great city from a 
New England Puritan country college, where nothing was 
considered worth while except scholarship and character; 



14 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

where work began at 7 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m.; where 
academic rank was the one thing above all else which was 
coveted; where the Thursday evening prayer meeting was 
the chief recreation; where teachers and students were in- 
timately acquainted; where the students, coming from all 
parts of the country, lived together in the community of 
the dormitory; where dress was simple, meals were frugal, 
society was natural, and sport was unknown; where physi- 
cal and mental vigor in the bracing air of the country made 
for work and clean character, and the premium was placed 
upon the man who won the valedictory and yet worked his 
way through, as the phrase went. 

The Columbia School of Arts made the decided impres- 
sion upon me of a day school for the sons of residents of 
New York, who came rather irregularly to the exercises of 
the school at about ten o'clock in the morning, attended 
recitations until one, and then went home again. What 
they did in the way of study during the afternoons was 
not very apparent in the recitations of the following day, 
and, as most of them lived with their parents, it would 
probably have been regarded as an impertinence on the 
part of their teachers to have inquired more nearly into 
this subject. 

The Amherst College of that day, it may be said, was 
destined to exert a nation-wide influence through the 
able men which it was turning out as college teachers. 
The list of Columbia faculties alone contains the names 
of nearly a score of professors who were graduated 
from Amherst in the fifteen years from 1867 to 1882. 

Although one can trace the beginnings of a con- 
ventionalized student type, due probably to intermin- 



INTRODUCTION 15 

glings at fraternity conventions and regattas, there was 
a much sharper line of distinction as to manners and 
customs than at present. The picture of the "Harvard 
Man'' was already drawn in the mind of the outsider 
(and persists there unchanged to the present day). 
The Columbia dandy looked down upon the rural 
Princetonian, and the Cornellian was regarded by both 
as a wild- Western product accidentally deposited on 
the hither side of the Alleghany Mountains. 

The smaller colleges were still mainly under the 
evangelistic influence of their founders, but in all 
these institutions there was a growing complexity 
in the social life, due to a greater plentifulness of 
spending money, and also probably to our American 
instinct for the organization of everything. 

The r61e of the faculty in the days of rapid develop- 
ment along all of these lines in the eighties is a little 
hard to understand. It is, perhaps, the fairest thing to 
assume that the professors simply did not see the es- 
sential point in what was happening about them. For 
a number of reasons they were glad enough to give up 
the old disciplinary control. In the case of the best 
men, the primary interest was in productive scholar- 
ship. It must be remembered that at that time prac- 
tically the only career open to the productive scholar 
was that of the undergraduate teacher. With many 
men the hours of teaching were regarded as a necessary 



1 6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

but uninspiring chore, and there was little or no desire 
to supplement them by individual relations with stu- 
dents. Outside of the classroom they were also influ- 
enced, I think, by the German tradition of student 
freedom, forgetting, among other things, that the 
German university drew its students only from the 
very rigorous selection of the G3minasium course 
instead of from our helter-skelter secondary-school 
system. There were notable exceptions, of course, but, 
by and large, the whole complicated system of or- 
ganized college life as we have it to-day developed 
without any competent or sympathetic oversight. At 
any rate, the professors of the eighties failed to supply 
either a temporary type of control to tide over the 
changing conditions in the student body, or, what 
would have been easier, and, I think, really more 
effective, to recognize the latent intellectual possi- 
bilities of these undergraduates to let the pleasure 
of brain activity supply the correcting and regulating 
influence, Amherst and Bowdoin, and one or two 
other colleges, did do this for a while, but instead of 
setting an example for others to follow, they gener- 
ally slipped back into the prevailing policy of laissez- 
faire. 

Individual alumni exerted some influence during 
this period, not always, it must be said, for the best, 
but in general the students were left to themselves 



INTRODUCTION 17 

during the late eighties and early nineties more than 
at any period before or since. 

The general results, as manifested in the nineties, 
and the need of college reform, were first brought to 
the attention of the American public by Mr. Clarence 
F. Birdseye, not a wholly safe and sane critic, but one 
whose service at this time should not be overlooked. 
His picture of the period is doubtless overdrawn. My 
personal memories, and the impressions which I can 
get from talking with thoughtful alumni, are certainly 
to that effect, but, none the less, there was during 
these days a shameful waste of good material. Men 
who should have been retained in college until gradu- 
ation were permitted to drift away, while others, who 
now hold their diplomas, should indubitably have been 
shown the door; and the faculties were apparently 
oblivious to much that was going on about them. The 
sense of individual responsibility for conduct, which 
had been powerful in the evangelistic days, had greatly 
decreased, and the sense of social responsibility, which 
is coming to be, perhaps, the most striking factor in 
the life of to-day, had hardly been born. 

The fraternity influences, which had been growing 
daily stronger as these societies took up the problems 
of boarding and lodging, so largely neglected by the 
colleges, were not as a rule on the side of good stand- 
ards in morals or manners. There was far more drink- 



1 8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

ing than there should have been, very much more than 
there is to-day, and apparently it was not even neces- 
sary to know how to **hold one's Kquor like a gentle- 
man." The athletic standards were very bad. The 
historic cases of brutality in football are nearly all of 
this period, and there was almost no oversight of either 
the academic or amateur standing of college athletics. 
The miscellaneous outbursts of student enthusiasm 
often degenerated into vandalism. These were the 
days of "Med. Fac." activities at Harvard, one of 
which was to embellish the statue of the honored 
founder by painting on a pair of crimson stockings. 
The colleges are still paying for these dark days in 
various ways, some of which are obvious and others 
more obscure but none the less real. 

Even before the publication of Mr. Birdseye's in- 
dictment, however, the tide had begun to turn. Not a 
few alumni were exerting a more wholesome influence 
through the fraternities and other social organizations. 
The American people, by the way, are often criticized 
by Europeans as lacking the art of natural social inter- 
course. They seem to need some dinner, convention, 
or other external excuse for coming together, and per- 
haps the loyalty of our college alumni to fraternal and 
class gatherings may be a symptom of this national 
weakness. At any rate, we may thank the tendency 
for a supply of devoted alumni to influence under- 



INTRODUCTION 19 

graduate conditions as they had the chance in their 
own colleges, and to plan for better control and over- 
sight at national gatherings of various organizations. 
Much credit should also be given to the Young Men's 
Christian Association for the earnest and intelligent 
work of its college branches. 

Often as the result of flagrant athletic scandals, 
greater administrative care began to be exercised by 
the colleges themselves, largely under the influence of 
the younger men on the teaching and administrative 
staff. Perhaps the most important factor of all, how- 
ever, was a raising of the standards for admission and 
promotion, not only in the colleges themselves, but in 
the professional schools of the country. This meant 
the incoming of a better type of student intellectually, 
boys to whom the joys of disorder and dissipation were 
relatively less attractive. The placing of the great 
professional schools of the country upon a basis of 
preliminary college training restored, furthermore, to 
the college many serious and ambitious youths of the 
type which, as we have seen, had during the previous 
generation been drawn directly from the secondary 
schoolinto professional study. 

One must remember that these changes from the 
historic type of fifty years ago have not come about 
uniformly. Some colleges have been really revolu- 
tionized by them, others affected only in part, and still 



ao THE UNDERGRADUATE 

others very little if at all. Some are still under the old- 
fashioned faculty discipline, and others represent in 
their standards to-day the worst traditions of the in- 
terregnum. There are, for example, not a few colleges, 
with names well known to those who study the sport- 
ing pages of the newspapers, which will gladly admit 
boys two years short of graduation from any standard 
secondary school, particularly if the boy in question 
has devoted his school years to the development of 
athletic proficiency rather than to intellectual prog- 
ress, and with the public the good colleges share in 
the bad repute of the others. Nor have the changes in 
curriculum and manner of teaching, the requirements 
for degrees, and the like, during the same period, been 
more uniform. Taking the country as a whole, how- 
ever, we may observe the following five lines of general 
development in the last quarter-century. 

In the first place, the programme of studies has been 
greatly widened in range. Subjects then only timidly 
knocking at the door now find themselves firmly es- 
tabhshed and in a position to protest against the in^ 
trusion of the present generation of newcomers. 

Secondly, there has been a very definite swing of 
the pendulum back from the unrestricted election of 
the studies which, under Eliot's powerful influence at 
Harvard, had spread pretty rapidly. The new schemes 
bear various devices, *'core of fundamentals^" "ma- 



INTRODUCTION 21 

jors/* "sequences," "concentration and distribution," 
and the like, but the main purpose is always to see that 
the student has not everything his own way. On the 
other hand, the insistence on particular studies has 
nowhere been fully restored. 

Thirdly, the time element has come to be regarded 
as much more important and the old idea of a four- 
year course for everybody is doomed. The acceptance 
of some professional work toward the bachelor's degree 
is well-nigh universal, and summer-session work and 
credit for high grades or for additional subjects offered 
at entrance all tend to release from artificial trammels 
the student who is willing and able to move more 
rapidly than his fellows. 

Fourthly, much more attention is given on the part 
of college faculties to eificiency in teaching. The old 
idea that the possession of a Ph.D. degree can cover a 
multitude of sins, both of commission and omission, 
has not fully departed, but we hope it is on its way. 

In the fifth place, the administrative ofl&ces of the 
colleges are devoting far more attention to the indi- 
vidual care of students and are endeavoring to interest 
themselves primarily in the most promising rather 
than in the least promising members of the student 
body. They are endeavoring to estabhsh closer rela- 
tions with the parents of students and in general are 
improving the machinery of supervision in many ways. 



22 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

To appreciate the degree of our paternalism we must 
contrast it with conditions abroad. In Germany, to 
quote Professor Swift (and the same thing is true else- 
where on the Continent) : — 

It is expected that the student entering upon a univer- 
sity career will spend one, two, or three years, wandering 
from one university to another, attending such lectures as 
he chooses, but on the whole living a care-free life. The 
faculty is not concerned with his private morals, his at- 
tendance upon classes, nor the quaUty of his work, in case 
he chooses to study. If the youth acquires, during these 
free years, freie Jahre, morals and habits which prove his 
undoing, he has simply shown that he was not of the stuff 
that men are made of, and society and his profession are 
saved from an undesirable weakling. 

There is one change, more fundamental than any of 
these, which is still in the making. It is not limited to 
the colleges, but is slowly modifying our attitude to all 
branches of education. Eliot, after fifty years of study, 
writes that two fundamental desires have developed 
within his experience — for a knowledge of facts, and 
for a chance to be of service. It is with the second that 
this change has to do. Its nature can best be expressed 
by contrasting the two words "rights" and "duties." 
Our fathers heard much of the rights of each young 
American to an education. We are only just beginning 
to hear of the duties of the educated man in a com- 
munity; a careful search of our educational literature 



INTRODUCTION * 13 

will reveal very few references to duty at all. Germany 
was the first nation to develop the social object of edu- 
cation as contrasted with the individual, and it be- 
hooves us, now that we are on the same path, neither 
to drift into her errors nor to resist all progress along 
these lines because of them. 

In the colleges this conception will have its effect 
both on the curriculum and upon student affairs, and 
is already exerting more influence than the casual 
observer realizes. 

Under the individualistic idea education for leader- 
ship was obvious, and the whole machinery was or- 
ganized to that end; for instance, in sports only a 
handful in the community were really trained; but 
these few had a chance to develop qualities of leader- 
ship — as witness the famous reference to the playing- 
fields of Eton. The same is true of fraternity life and 
other social groupings. As to the course of study, if 
you want to develop a leader who will lead primarily 
for the saike of doing so, it does n't much matter what 
he studies, and the word "study" may be used in its 
broadest sense. Nowadays, however, when duties are 
growing in importance relatively to rights, and when 
the social objects of education are beginning to out- 
weigh the individual, we shall need a new type of 
leader, trained for a social rather than an individual 
purpose; and what and how he learns during the 



24 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

period of his preparation make a great deal of differ- 
ence. How rapidly and how completely the educa- 
tional organization can succeed in identifying itself 
with this new order, and whether it can serve as a 
guide along paths that are logical and practical, with- 
out losing the sense of the higher human aspirations, 
furnishes a problem which is already pressing for 
solution. 

Biological development comes, as DeVries has 
shown, not only through a multitude of infinitely 
sHght changes, but by sudden leaps, "mutations" as 
they are called; and this is equally true in hiunan life. 
We all know the phenomenon of sudden and striking 
change in individuals, due to some powerful influence. 
The flame of life may blaze up as a result of a religious 
conversion, or the right girl, or from a new realization 
of social responsibility, or of scientific truth. What 
happens to individuals happens also in social groups, 
and if I am not greatly mistaken the entry of the 
United States into the Great War will prove to be a 
stimulus which will profoundly change the nature, 
not only of countless American collegians, but of the 
American college itself. 

Certainly no chapter in the historical development 
of the American college would be complete without 
some reference to the events of the weeks following the 
declaration of war. It is too early to grasp their full 



INTRODUCTION 25 

significance, but that their results will be far-reaching, 
and will not be merely along lines of military training 
and efficiency, is certain. Much of the activity has 
been typical of a desire on the part of all ages and 
classes of an overwrought nation to do something, and 
thereby obtain the relief that comes with an emotional 
discharge. Much also has been along the lines of ex- 
isting convention and of the herding instinct. Let us 
admit that sentiment, and even sentimentality, have 
played their part. It should be remembered further 
that for many of the changes already made, and others 
to come, the war, as Simeon Strunsky says in another 
connection, is not a reason, but an opportunity. To 
understand them we must look back to forces which 
have been developing, often unrecognized, for years, 
forces which have been awaiting some such cataclysm 
to find an outlet. 

Out of the mass of individual events two very signifi- 
cant general facts may be recognized. In the first 
place, the young man in the colleges who has failed to 
ask himself as to how he may best take his share in the 
Nation's responsibility is the rare exception. His ac-» 
tion has been marked not only by proper recognition 
of the emergency, but by a high degree of intelligence 
of choice. From the glorious risks of the Aviation 
Corps to the humdrum work of tilling the fields, or the 
even harder decision to finish a course in order to be 



26 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of greater service later on, the undergraduates and 
young alumni of our colleges have made a record of 
which the Nation may well be proud. 

No one, except a few paciphobes who had been 
alarmed at the growing habit of undergraduates to 
think for themselves, feared that our students as in- 
dividuals would stand back in the fear of hardship or 
danger when the new call to arms should come, any 
more than they did in '6i and '98; but very few, if any, 
realized how complete a revolution in our apparently 
hard-and-fast institutional and social life would be the 
result, or that this would com.e almost as a matter of 
course. The students gave up without a moment's 
hesitation their cherished games and gatherings and 
all the careless but comfortable routine of their daily 
lives. How complete was the overturning may be 
realized when it is remembered that from one of the 
smaller State universities more than five hundred stu- 
dents left during the spring for farmwork alone, and 
that throughout the country the typical fraternity 
group, normally of twenty-five or thirty, was cut down , 
last spring with practical uniformity to six or seven. 

A friend from a New England college wrote to me in 
May: — 

I cannot help contrasting in my own mind the difference 
in the atmosphere here to-day with that back in the winter 
and spring of '98 when the Spanish War broke out. In that 



INTRODUCTION ^^ 

spring when the call for men actually materialized, our 
group joined a volunteer company and, one fine morning, 
led by the college band and accompanied by the whole 
student body, marched down to the train and were shipped 
off in the midst of rousing enthusiasm. Those who re- 
mained did some drilling on the campus, but in the main 
conducted their lives as usual. 

To-day, there is more drilling, but our men are slipping 
away by ones and twos and threes, some going to France 
in the Ambulance Corps, some into the Naval Reserve, and 
many others from all parts of the country returning to 
their homes preliminary to entering local Reserve Officers' 
Camps. Concentrated as our life is around six acres of 
greensward, each new vacancy is apparent to all. Hence, 
the life has slowed up and almost halted. The thousand or 
more men who are still with us are hardly seen except at 
drill time, and there is a singularly quiet air over all the 
place. 

The second outstanding fact is that ruthless change 
may be made in the organic fabric of our colleges with- 
out interfering with the essential vitality of the institu- 
tion. Faculties which had seemed forever committed 
to what they conceived to be the only sound standards 
of education cast away their measuring-rods and rule- 
books, and gave credit for all sorts of vocational labo- 
ratory courses offered by the School of Experience. 
Teachers have been released right and left for national 
service, and their colleagues are gladly shouldering the 
additional burdens thus laid upon them. Whether or 
not the preliminary trimming of sail, in the way of 



28 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

deductions in the teaching staff which some boards of 
trustees have made, is justified by the prospect of 
reduced income, is open to question. Some institutions 
evidently do not think it is. Dartmouth, for one, 
guaranteed for next year full security to the members 
of her teaching staff, and Cornell has actually in- 
creased salaries to meet harder living conditions. 

The importance of keeping the undergraduate ma- 
chine in good working order and of keeping the 
younger boys at work was perhaps overlooked at first, 
in spite of the tragic example furnished by England in 
the early days of the war; but it has now been realized, 
and the resolutions adopted at a meeting of college 
representatives held in Washington last May made 
formal recognition of it. The Bureau of Education has 
sent out the following: — 

The number of students in colleges, universities, and 
technical schools should increase rather than diminish. 
Many of the older and upper-class men will volunteer for 
some branch of the military service, but all young men 
below the age of liability to selective draft and those not 
recommended for special service should be urged to remain 
and take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the 
colleges, universities, and technical schools, to the end that 
they may be able to render the most effective service in the 
later years of the war and the times of need that will follow. 

All students should be made to understand that it is 
their duty to give to their country and to the world the 
best and fullest possible measure of service, and that both 



INTRODUCTION 29 

will need more than they will get of that high type of serv- 
ice which only men and women of the best education and 
training can give. Patriotism and the desire to serve hu- 
manity may require of these young men and women the 
exercise of that very high type of self-restraint that will 
keep them to their tasks of preparation until the time comes 
when they can render service which cannot be rendered by 
others. 

It will be hard, but it will be necessary, for the col- 
leges to make the students of real possibilities realize 
that the long road of preparation for scientific and 
scholarly achievement is for them a patriotic road. 
Not only the United States, but the world at large, 
will need, as never before, doctors and engineers and 
chemists of the broadest possible training; but it will 
need even more intellectual leaders of thorough his- 
torical and social preparation for the days to come. 
When boys of this type withdraw for active service, 
as many of them will do, — and who will blame them? 
— they should be drawn back after the war, without 
reference to rules and red tape. To hold the present 
undergraduates who are not of the draft age, it will 
undoubtedly be necessary to provide military training 
more generally than has been our previous national 
habit, for it would be too much to expect these boys to 
look far enough into the future to recognize the prac- 
tical value of purely cultural studies. They will de- 
mand something more concrete. The move toward 



30 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

such training had already begun before our entry into 
the war. The State universities, where military work 
had in many cases grown pretty perfunctory, had 
braced up, and in 191 6 two thousand undergraduates 
from other colleges had voluntarily gone to summer 
training camps. One institution sent fifteen per cent 
of its undergraduates. 

For the year 191 7-18, at any rate, the Government, 
with its overwhelming task of creating an army of a 
million men or more, cannot spare the officers and 
equipment which would otherwise be at the service of 
the colleges. The War Department could doubtless 
look after a few, but it has to play fair to the group as 
a whole, and the best that can be hoped is that it may 
be able to continue certain existing arrangements. 
For this reason the training in general must be by 
retired officers and by invaHded members of the Cana- 
dian, British, and French forces. The training given 
by the Frenchmen at Harvard, by the way, has 
already taught us pedagogical lessons of no slight 
importance. 

Since the Government cannot furnish the instructors 
and the equipment, it cannot well grant such formal 
recognition of the work done by the students as could 
be counted toward a commission — a fact which will 
cause not a little heartburning, but which, in a broad 
sense, is not so unfortunate. The training will stand 



INTRODUCTION 31 

the recipients in good stead in any event, and the sys- 
tem of the selective draft, to which the country is now 
committed, will be strong or weak precisely as the 
men drawn have a free chance for promotion or not. 
If conmiissions fall as of right to college men, or to any 
other selected group, the draft will give a conscript 
army and not a national army. 

How long the military training will remain a part of 
the curriculum and how permanent will be the present 
close connection between scholarly affairs and military 
affairs, it is too soon to say. Perhaps the best forecast 
is that of " Cosmos " : — 

National service can no longer remain an empty phrase, 
but must be given life and meaning and universal applica- 
tion. As the spirit and principles of democracy require that 
there be the widest possible participation in the formula- 
tion of public policy, so this spirit and these principles 
require that there shall be the widest possible participation 
in the Nation's service, and, if need be, in its defense. An 
army of hired soldiers as the chief dependence of a demo- 
cratic people is as much an anachronism as an army of 
hired voters would be. . . . Outside and beyond a public 
educational system of the Nation there should be estab- 
lished without delay a system of universal training for na- 
tional service and, should it ever be needed, for national 
defense. Such a policy is the antithesis of militarism; it is 
democracy conscious and mindful of its duties and respon- 
sibilities as well as of its rights. 

At any rate, the colleges will not have fulfilled their 
function until they have played their part in the work 



32 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of reconstruction and reconciliation which must follow 
the war. If the result is to be a real victory for human- 
ity, it is for them to break away, when necessary, from 
the trammels of a conventionalized and unthinking 
patriotism, to remind the nations that justice and lib- 
erty are as necessary as they were in 1776, and that 
authority, as Bertrand Russell has pointed out, needs 
always to be tempered by a spirit of reverence. 

Our " social consciousness " should not be permit- 
ted to develop upon an exclusively national basis. 
The great problems for thoughtful men in the recon- 
struction period after the war will be questions of 
international social consciousness, of international con- 
ciliation. 

In the meantime, as the natural leaders of thought 
the colleges have a function in keeping the spirit of 
patriotism as free as possible from the taint of hatred 
and bitterness. The Secretary of War, in a recent 
address to their presidents, has reminded the colleges 
of an opportunity which is peculiarly theirs: — 

You gentlemen and the young men who are in your col-: 
leges, who go to their homes and write to their homes from 
your colleges, and make up a very large part of the direc- 
tion of public opinion, can exercise a curative influence by 
preaching the doctrine of tolerance, by exemplifying the 
fact that it is not necessary for a nation like the United 
States, which is fighting for the vindication of a great ideal, 
to discolor its purpose by hatreds or by the entertainment 
of any unworthy emotion. 



INTRODUCTION 33 

The undergraduates who feel honestly that all 
armed conflict is unjustifiable are having a hard time 
of it, and deserve better of the community than they 
are likely to receive. They had the misfortune to be 
born in advance of their time. To brand them indis- 
criminately as cowards is unfair. Any one who thinks 
it takes less courage to stand out against an excited 
public opinion than to take one's chance of physical 
injury, spurred on by the cheers of the Nation, has 
only to try it to learn better. That some of these 
young men will seek for conspicuous martyrdom is only 
human nature, particularly the human nature of in- 
dividualists, but this will make it all the harder for 
the others who respect the convictions of those who 
beheve it their duty to fight, and who earnestly seek 
some opportunity for service to their country. 

It is also too soon to foretell what permanent 
changes the war will work in the organization and 
administration of the colleges and in student life, but 
that these changes will be profound there is little 
doubt. Faculties and students alike will have already 
learned that regulations and customs which seem to be 
of the very essence of the collegiate structure can be 
swept aside without shock, to say nothing of catas- 
trophe. When the normal course is resumed, many of 
these will never be restored or will be in a form almost 



34 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

unrecognizable. On the other hand, as I have already 
pointed out, certain tendencies which had been at 
work, sometimes for years preceding the war, will be 
greatly accelerated, and will come to fruition without 
the lengthy, and perhaps bitter, struggle which would 
otherwise have been inevitable. The change in the 
faculty point of view, which, of course, has operated 
and will operate with varying intensity in different 
institutions, will, I think, be along the following lines. 
In the first place, the parental attitude which the 
American college has always maintained toward its 
students will no longer be limited to matters of per- 
sonal morals and conduct, but will include the stu- 
dent's public usefulness, a recognition of his place in 
the public order. This will mean additions to the 
curriculimi to provide for such usefulness in mili- 
tary subjects in geography and international studies 
and in other fields. It will involve also an increased 
realization of the importance of the physical fitness of 
the group as a whole, as contrasted with the posses- 
sion of winning teams of specialists. In order to real- 
ize Pasteur's conception of democracy as "that form of 
government which permits every individual citizen to 
develop himself to do his best for the common good," 
it will mean, as individual needs and desires must be 
met, a loss of faith in rules and calendars in and for 
themselves, and, I hope, a corresponding realization of 



INTRODUCTION 35 

what the individual boy, and what the whole group, is 
capable of under vivid stimulus. 

I hope also that it will be recognized that questions 
of discipline and control are not so terrifying as they 
have seemed. Boys who have been brought up as badly 
as it is possible to conceive fall promptly, and not too 
uncomfortably, into the routine of the military train- 
ing camp. On the other hand, one must not conclude 
too much, for the boy with a discipUned body may 
have an undisciplined mind, and vice versa. 

The colleges should plan to profit by the present 
public recognition of the national importance of the 
part played by the non-technical undergraduate 
courses, and by the best elements of college life, in 
producing a type of resourceful young men, willing 
and ready to take responsible part in any national 
emergency. The importance of this part just now has 
been set forth in a recent article in the ^'New Repub- 
lic'' which closes as follows: — 

One of the conditions that the Germans counted on, 
when they decided to risk American intervention, was our 
notorious lack of ojOScers to make effective our otherwise 
unlimited man power. They reckoned without our colleges. 
Here we have tens of thousands of young men, physically 
fit and mentally alert, willing to work harder than any 
other class of men in equipping themselves with the essen- 
tials of the military officer's art. They are not men who 
fret over the loss of a year or two that might be applied 
to their training as accountants or physicians or philol- 



3(f THE UNDERGRADUATE 

ogists. They have given years to undifferentiated culture 
and they are willing to give further years to the national 
service, not doubting that they will fit themselves satis- 
factorily into the scheme of practical affairs when the war 
is over. Therefore they have not hung back, waiting for the 
formal draft, but by thousands have applied themselves to 
the acquisition of military training with an energy to aston- 
ish and sadden their former teachers, in whose courses a 
zeal for work had not been conspicuous. Thanks to the 
colleges, we shall not lack material for officers when our 
body of recruits is forthcoming. 

From the point of view of national military efficiency, 
then, the American college has succeeded. It has selected 
a body of young men who are available for the national 
service and it has animated them with a spirit that will 
make their services invaluable. And from the point of view 
of national efficiency in peace, the college, we shall proba- 
bly come to realize better, has played its part successfully. 
Its methods have operated, more or less blindly to be sure, 
toward keeping vigorous the ideal of general adaptability 
which is perhaps the Nation's greatest asset. 

It would be a rash man who would venture to be 
more specific in his forecasts, and, after all, the per- 
manent elements in our college life will outweigh the 
changes, profound as these latter are sure to be; for 
this reason I shall not apologize for the fact that my 
discussion of the American college in the chapters to 
follow is, of necessity, primarily on the basis of con- 
ditions in 19 16, rather than in 191 7. 



CHAPTER II 
PRESENT-DAY TYPES OF COLLEGE 

How can one classify our colleges of to-day? Per- 
haps the most obvious natural division would be as 
between the institutions devoted wholly to undergrad- 
uate work and those where the collegiate department 
is part of a larger university organization. In the for- 
mer group many of the best-known examples are to be 
found in New England and in the Middle States, col- 
leges of fine traditions and good standards, like Bow- 
doin and Hamilton and Haverford. They are also 
scattered through the Middle West and the South; 
Wabash, Earlham, and Beloit, for example, and Trin- 
ity College in North Carolina. Other institutions, 
while having one or more professional schools asso- 
ciated with them, are, after all, primarily collegiate in 
character, as, for example, Dartmouth and Princeton. 

The colleges which are integral parts of broader uni- 
versity organizations include the whole group of State 
institutions and the endowed universities like Har- 
vard, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Chicago. In some of 
these universities the collegiate department is small in 
numbers and influence, but in most of them it is a very 
essential part of the life of the institution as a whole. 



38 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

A very important factor, so far as the college is con- 
cerned, is the standards of the professional schools in 
the institutions in question. If these standards are 
only tl^ose of high-school admission, many of the best 
students never enter the college at all. With higher 
standards a large share of the men attracted to the 
university primarily for professional study satisfy the 
preliminary requirements for such study in the uni- 
versity college. 

In practically all of the larger universities the under- 
graduate student has the privilege of electing one, or in 
some cases two, years of professional study and offer- 
ing it toward his bachelor's degree, and this privilege, 
which obviously shortens the total period of college 
and university residence, is perhaps the main factor in 
the rapid growth of the university colleges as con- 
trasted with that of independent colleges. This dis- 
parity in growth is a fact which is only just beginning 
to be generally recognized. Within the five-year period 
for 1911-16 the number of male undergraduates of the 
University of California increased by eight hundred, 
whereas the combined growth of seven large inde- 
pendent colleges for men, in the same period, was 
less than half that figure. 

Colleges divide into other groups on the basis of the 
sources of their support. The earliest type looked to 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 39 

the support of the devout and generous of some partic- 
ular rehgious group or sect, and the "denominational 
college " still plays a large part in our collegiate scheme 
of things. Sects which most of us know only dimly by 
name have their own colleges; indeed, the only large 
religious body which has not seems to be the Chris- 
tian Scientists. The original formal relation with the 
denomination has often broken down, sometimes from 
the sense of the need of full freedom of conscience, 
and in a few recent cases for the more practical reason 
that the welcome Carnegie pensions go only to profes- 
sors in institutions free from definite religious control. 
Even in the institutions where such control affects the 
membership of the president or faculty, there has 
almost uniformly been entire freedom among the stu- 
dent body, and to-day certain of the Roman Catholic 
institutions — which for traditional reasons have been 
most conservative in this regard — are welcoming 
students of other faiths. An interesting movement is 
the establishment of small denominational colleges in 
the vicinity of the State universities. These colleges 
get the advantages of the library and other facilities of 
the larger institution, and in turn act as feeders for its 
professional and technical schools. 

The denominational colleges include in their number 
some of our best and some of our very worst. The 
worst of them are really semi-proprietary high schools 



40 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

with a college cupola, and the religious afi^ation is 
h'ttle but a cloak to cover the loosest kind of academic 
chicanery. In the good ones the evangelistic mission- 
ary spirit in which they were founded is still a force, 
but denominationalism is not permitted to hamper the 
intellectual growth of the institution. Often the stu- 
dents of such colleges, even the smaller ones, are 
drawn from a wide area. The alimmi have tended to 
go into preaching or teaching, and, scattered over the 
country as they are, their influence has been exerted, 
sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, 
to send boys back to their alma mater. An association 
of American colleges (mainly the denominational ones) 
is at work to emphasize their place in the scheme of 
things. Although denominational institutions are still 
being established, as, for example, the Southern 
Methodist University in Texas, most 'of the more re- 
cent institutions foimded by private generosity, such 
as Reed College and Rice Institute, have no denomi- 
national flavor. 

In the early days all the colleges, even the denomi- 
national ones, did not hesitate to beg freely and often 
successfully for governmental aid. The State legis- 
latures, however, soon adopted the policy of starting 
their own institutions or taking over existing private 
foimdations. The first to rise to prominence was the 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 41 

University of Michigan, which had grown to one thou- 
sand undergraduates in the year 1890. That of the 
youngest State, Oklahoma, has to-day seventeen hun- 
dred students and an annual income of a quarter of a 
million dollars. In the modern State-supported uni- 
versity the income for general purposes usually de- 
pends upon a mill tax, supplemented by special grants 
for building and other particular purposes. Many 
States originally divided the educational funds among 
two or more institutions and in some this arrangement 
has persisted, but the general tendency has been 
toward administrative centralization, if not toward 
unification. The latest figures available show, in all, 
one hundred and sixty-six State educational institu- 
tions, with 133,000 students. The State universities 
vary greatly in efficiency and standards; by no means 
all of them yet requiring their students to graduate 
from high school before entering. 

In 1862 the Morrill grant made provision for federal 
support of State institutions, in the form of scrip en- 
titling the holder to certain public lands belonging to 
the Government. Many of the State universities let 
this scrip go for a song to meet current needs, but the 
wise ones held on and have, of course, been richly re- 
warded. The present strength of Cornell University is 
largely due to the courage of Ezra Cornell during its 
lean years in holding scrip issued to that institution in 



42 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

the absence of a definite state university in New York. 
The Adams, Smith-Lever, and other laws recently 
enacted will provide new sources of income from the 
Federal Government. 

The State university, in its conception and often in 
its realization, is a fit crown to the public education 
system of the Commonwealth, and the best ones instill 
into their students the realization of what citizenship 
in a democracy should mean. At the University of 
Oregon the students acknowledge their obligation in a 
formal pledge, which reads in part: — 

The opportunities open to me here for securing training, 
ideals, and vision for life, I deeply appreciate and regard as 
a sacred trust, and do hereby pledge my honor that it shall 
be my most cherished purpose to render as bountiful a 
return to the Oregon people and their posterity, in faithful 
and ardent devotion to the common good as will be in my 
power. 

The material equipment of these institutions is sec- 
ond to none in the world. The university spending the 
most on its library to-day, for example, is not Harvard 
or Columbia, but the University of Illinois. In a rich 
State there is practically no limit to the results which 
may be obtained from a legislature honestly proud of 
the State and all its works, and a president with the 
art of showing just how to "wipe the eye " of the neigh- 
boring "millionaires^ plaything" or of the rival State- 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 43 

university. Minnesota and Wisconsin each gives its 
university over $1,600,000 annually, and Illinois 
averages $2,500,000. Some of them, notably Califor- 
nia, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, have had their State 
grants generously supplemented by private gifts. 

Of course there are corresponding disadvantages as a 
result of being in politics. A professor in one of the 
Western State universities recently said that the State- 
supported institution *'must admit to its student body 
students of moderate ability who would properly be 
excluded by institutions established and financed by 
private or denominational agencies. It cannot estab- 
lish an intellectual aristocracy." Sometimes political 
interests even find devious ways to influence academic 
appointments, though this is commendably rare. 

The typical State university of a decade or so ago 
was a group consisting of a college and a number of 
professional and technical schools all starting on the 
same level. A student could enter any one of them 
directly from the high school. The girls of the State 
usually went to the academic department, as the col- 
lege was called, but in general the boys, including 
many of the most ambitious and virile, went straight 
into the technical school, usually to that of engineering 
or agriculture. As a result subjects like Hterature and 
philosophy came to be regarded as "girl food" by the 
male population, to be pursued, if at all, only at con- 



44 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

venient hours and with the practical guarantee of a 
passing mark. The rising standards for the profes- 
sional schools are bringing back the boys to the college 
course for at least a year or so of preliminary work, 
but the old-fashioned culture subjects of the college 
programme are still under considerable suspicion. 
At the University of Minnesota, for example, out of 
more than 3500 men, last term, only twenty-five were 
studying College Latin, and twenty-three studying 
Greek, including the beginners. It is stated that one 
of the main reasons for dropping the requirements 
of the classics for the A.B. degree was to save the 
coeducational colleges from complete feminization. 

In 1866 the Old Free Academy of New York City 
was rechristened the CoUege of the City of New York, 
but the example of a college supported by municipal 
taxation found few followers until within recent years, 
when several strong city institutions have been organ- 
ized, notably in Ohio, where the city University of 
Cincinnati had already been active for some time. It 
looks as if the particular field of these city colleges 
would prove to be in the training for municipal service, 
the city departments being used as laboratories of the 
social and pohtical sciences by their students. The 
New York City College is now making elaborate plans 
alon": these lines. 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 45 

Contrasted with State and municipal institutions 
are those whose support, beyond the income from fees, 
comes indirectly rather than directly from the com- 
munity — from endowments and gifts for current 
purposes. The private gifts to higher education in this 
country have no parallel in the history of mankind. It 
has been said, indeed, that on the average every college 
student to-day enjoys approximately one hundred and 
twenty dollars annually from current gifts and from 
the income on earlier gifts. 

We have in this group the historic universities of the 
Atlantic Seaboard with their numberless benefactors; 
the so-called one-man shows, Chicago and Stanford, 
though both have ceased to deserve the epithet; all of 
the denominational colleges, and even some of the 
most shameless of the proprietary diploma mills. 

Under favorable conditions the cause of intellectual 
freedom and progress is best served within their walls. 
Thus far practically all the important improvements in 
academic standards have been initiated in them. On 
the other hand, a short-sighted group in the board 
of trustees or a capricious donor may sometimes do as 
much harm as the most mischievous demagogue in a 
State legislature. 

Still another classification might be made, between 
those institutions where there is absolutely no distinc- 
tion as to the sexes, like Cornell and Oberlin, and those 



46 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

where separate mstruction is furnished for undergrad- 
uate men and women, as Columbia, Western Reserve, 
and Tulane Universities. The strictly monastic insti- 
tutions are relatively few in number, and are nearly all 
on the Atlantic Seaboard. 

The United States was the first country to make any 
general provision for the higher education of women, 
and the example set at Oberlin in 1833 and at Antioch 
in 1853 has been generally followed by the institutions 
since then. Recently published statistics show that 
from 1895 to 1902 the number of students in separate 
colleges for women increased from 14,049 to 15,544, 
while the attendance of women in coeducational col- 
leges increased from 13,940 to 23,216. If we exclude 
Roman Catholic colleges, the percentage of coeduca- 
tional colleges grew from thirty per cent in 1870 to 
seventy- two per cent in 1902. 

Still another line of cleavage, broken down more or 
less in these days by the trolley and the motor, but 
which still has significance, is the line between the city 
and the country. On one side are the metropolitan 
universities like Columbia and Chicago, and also those 
within the sphere of influence of some large city and 
certain to be absorbed by it sooner or later; Harvard, 
for example, is now within eight minutes of Boston 
Common by subway trains; others are the University 
of California at Berkeley, across the Bay from San 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 47 

Francisco, and Washington University, in the out- 
skirts of St. Louis. Then there is the type represented 
by Yale and Wisconsin Universities, estabHshed in 
smaller cities; and, finally, the rural institutions, most 
of them much smaller in size than the city types, al- 
though Cornell, Princeton, and Dartmouth are not- 
able exceptions. The University of Illinois, originally 
a rural university, is rapidly building two towns 
about it. 

Colleges may be classified and subdivided in ways 
like these, and as much as you please, and no offense is 
taken. Each institution is proud of its particular status 
and regards it as an asset. But one enters upon dan- 
gerous ground in endeavoring to make any classifica- 
tion upon the most important basis of all — the basis 
of opportunities offered for college study and all-round 
development. The United States Bureau of Education, 
a few years ago, had the temerity to prepare a classi- 
fied list of our American colleges, based upon academic 
standards, but poHtical pressure almost immediately 
caused the withdrawal of the list from circulation. 

The materials are at hand, however, for a classifi- 
cation of this kind, or for a comparison between two 
given institutions by any intelligent student. The 
amount of endowment or the lack of it is a matter of 
record, as are the value of the physical equipment and 
such significant factors as the amounts of money de- 



48 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

voted to the library. The relative distinction of the 
faculty is harder to determine, but the facts as to for- 
mal preparation for the work to be undertaken, mem- 
bership and activity in learned societies, scholarly pro- 
duction, and the like, are available. A decision based 
upon such criteria might do injustice to some one first- 
rate individual teacher who is side-tracked in some 
third-rate institution, but it would not do injustice to 
any academic group as a whole. 

The quahty of the student body as contrasted with 
its quantity may be determined by a study of the 
standards of admission and advancement, to be 
learned for most colleges from the published reports 
of the Carnegie Foundation, which are a much safer 
guide than the college catalogue. It is the college of 
good repute which provides for its undergraduates 
nation-wide and sometimes international contacts. A 
chart has recently been published showing the geo- 
graphical distribution of the undergraduates in Har- 
vard, Yale, and Princeton. Harvard draws from every 
State; Yale from all but one; and Princeton from all 
but five. Another criterion is the success of recent 
graduates (to go too far back is deceptive) in competi- 
tion with men from other colleges; as, for example, the 
competition which develops in the great professional 
schools of the country. 

Finally, there is the general attitude of the institu- , 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 49 

tion toward its responsibilities. Is its policy coura- 
geous and progressive, or timid Sind laissez-faire? When 
the trustees elect a president, do they choose a man 
who can *' advertise the college and get money/' — 
one whose normal habitat soon becomes the Pullman 
car, — or an expert with the brains and industry to 
stay at home and make the college its own advertise- 
ment? 

These are all fair and practical avenues of inquiry, 
but any attempt to make a classification based upon 
them has always resulted in loud protest from every 
institution dissatisfied with the relative position in 
which it finds itself or fears to find itself, to the effect 
that these are external and material things — that 
what makes a college is its Spirit, with a capital S, and 
that the nobility and devotion of the faculty, and the 
earnestness and high moral qualities of the students, 
give to this particular college the Spirit which makes 
the statistics of the jealous outsider by comparison as 
tinkling brass and soimding cymbal. I don't want to 
belittle institutional spirit, which is a very real thing, 
but I submit that it is at least as likely to be found in 
the many well-equipped institutions with good stand- 
ards of administration and scholarship, situated in 
all parts of the country, as in the colleges which 
protest the loudest. Out of the six hundred and more 
institutions listed as colleges on the books of the 



50 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

United States Commissioner of Education, just about 
one hundred, by a generous estimate, deserve the title. 

This dangerous distinction between the real thing 
and the sham cuts across all the other bases of classi- 
fication. Honest standards have nothing to do with 
size, and Haverford, one of the smallest of the separate 
colleges, pays the highest average salaries to its teach- 
ers, while one of the rapidly growing "universities," 
which shall be nameless, would almost lead the pro- 
cession if it were moving in the opposite direction. 

No one knows which is the worst American college 
and which is the best, but we do know that the differ- 
ence between them, as measured in the opportunities 
offered to students, is literally enormous; and the dif- 
ference between the topmost tenth, or even fifth, and 
the corresponding group at the other end of the line, 
is nearly as great. It is not generally realized that of 
our American colleges, twenty-five per cent have a 
total income of less than twenty-five thousand dollars 
per annum, and that these colleges have a collegiate 
enrollment of fifteen thousand students. We have all 
laughed over the story of the local booster who said 
that his town was the most progressive in the State, 
that it had two imiversities and they were hauling the 
logs for a third, but our amusement is more at some- 
thing past and gone than the circumstances in many 
parts of the country really warrant. 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 51 

It behooves serious men and women to think of all 
these things; both in general as a matter of Httle rec- 
ognized fact in our national life, involving enormous 
waste, and in particular with reference to the young 
men and young women for whom they may in any way 
be responsible. 

One very important factor toward the solution of the 
problem of the small, poorly equipped college is the 
present movement toward the estabHshment of junior 
colleges; which frankly offer only the first two years of 
the customary college programme and devote all their 
energies to doing these two years well. Many have 
already taken the step, and the movement, particu- 
larly in the South and West, is likely to become a 
general one. It has the advantage of giving the student 
with only two years to spend the feeling that he is fin- 
ishing the particular job on which he started. The 
principle of the junior college has for some time been 
recognized at the University of Chicago and else- 
where, and the University of Washington, after a 
study of the whole question, has recently reorganized 
its undergraduate system with the jimior college as a 
basis. 

It is easy to misjudge conditions in any particular 
college because popular repute follows actual condi- 
tions claudo pede. Ahnost invariably the reputation, 



52 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

whether for good or bad, is at its height some time after 
the institution has ceased to deserve it. Colleges, like 
other living organisms, have ups and downs, and while 
the colleges with good equipment and standards never 
fall so low as the highest point reached by those not so 
blessed, still there is a great choice at any given time 
among colleges in any given group. This is for varying 
reasons. Sometimes a college is temporarily handi- 
capped by an unfortunate administration, with low- 
ered standards as a result of acute athleticism or a 
campaign for numbers. In universities the college fre- 
quently suffers from a focus of interest on some other 
part of the institution. Very often the college suffers 
from its own success, after a period of rapid growth 
without a corresponding improvement in facilities. 
Sometimes the trouble is a besetting complacency. 
There are other cases where no single obvious cause 
can be assigned, but where the institution is none the 
less evidently having an "off " period. 

On the other hand, every good college has its great 
periods, due, I think, more than anything else, to some 
subtle harmony and balance between the faculty and 
students. Harvard has had several such periods in 
her long career, and the Rutgers Class of '36, Yale ^53, 
or Princeton '77, or Columbia in the early eighties, are 
other examples. Later on, Knox College, in Illinois, 
and De Pauw, in Indiana, produced a group of strikiiig 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 53 

men within a few years, as did Oberlin and certain 
State universities of the Middle West. The pioneering 
days of a college are often very fertile, as was notably 
the case at Stanford. To-day Illinois and California 
Universities seem to the Eastern observer to carry the 
strongest voltage. 

The growing tendency toward a recognition of the 
difiference between good and bad colleges is partly the 
result of a growing desire on the part of men and 
women to patronize the colleges where they think they 
will make the best investment, and it is partly owing 
to the influence of certain outside agencies. The Car- 
negie Foundation has been much abused for a callous 
and inhuman standardization, but its work of exami- 
nation has been honestly and courageously done, and 
will count more and more for the good of our American 
college life. The gifts to educational purposes of the 
General Education Board are limited to institutions 
upon which its investigators are prepared to report 
favorably. Two or even three small colleges in the 
same region are not infrequently persuaded to merge 
by the bait of a gift from the Board made conditional 
upon their doing so. Every year about thirty colleges, 
too feeble to stand the competition of stronger institu- 
tions and too foolish to see the solution offered by the 
junior college or by a merger, quietly disappear from 



54 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

the map, and the process will doubtless be greatly ac- 
celerated by war conditions. Such colleges cannot af- 
ford the reduction in fees, and in the good-natured 
gifts which have heretofore kept them going, but 
which will now be turned into other channels. 

There is no national law forbidding the watering of 
educational stock, — witness some of the institutions 
in the District of Columbia, — but some of the States 
are making vigorous and successful efforts to improve 
conditions within their borders. If they are imable to 
drive out the unworthy institutions which have re- 
ceived charters in earher days, they are preventing the 
establishment of new "colleges" by requiring a spe- 
cific endowment as a prerequisite. In New York State 
the amount has been for some time $200,000, and in 
Pennsylvania by recent legislation it is $500,000. 

Other agencies which have not the advantage of 
contact with the purse-strings, but which are not with- 
out their influence, are the National Conference on 
Standards in Secondary Schools and Colleges, the 
various examining and certificating boards, and jour- 
nals like "The Educational Review,^' and "School and 
Society," to which, by the way, I am much indebted 
for modem instances of various kinds appearing in this 
volume. 

Strangely enough, the university professional 
schools, which might have exerted an enormous influ- 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 55 

ence on sounder college standards, have done little or 
nothing in the way of discriminating between good 
colleges and bad colleges, and the graduate schools 
(which it must be remembered are very largely profes- 
sional schools for the training of college teachers) are 
only just beginning to penalize the graduate of a weak 
institution by requiring from him a longer period of 
residence for the master's or doctor's degree. 

Colleges vary very widely in the distance they have 
traveled during the comparatively short time since 
requirements for admission and graduation were prac- 
tically uniform throughout the country. It is not my 
plan to go deeply here or elsewhere into pedagogic 
theory, but we must remember that these matters have 
their influence upon the undergraduate, about whom 
this book is written, and who, although he appears to 
remain singularly aloof from all these things, is really 
more concerned with them than any one else. 

The most striking change has been in the classics. 
According to Professor Luckey, *'in 1895-96 seventy- 
five per cent of the leading colleges and universities in 
our country required Greek for entrance to the A.B. 
degree, in 1907-08 the percentage fell to twenty- two 
per cent, while to-day it is five per cent. In 1895-96 
ninety-seven per cent of the leading colleges and uni- 
versities required Latin for entrance to the A.B. de- 



56 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

gree, in 1907-08 the percentage fell to sixty-three per 
cent, while to-day the percentage is forty-one per cent. 
In one hundred and six leading colleges and universi- 
ties to-day neither Latin nor Greek is required for en- 
trance to the A.B. degree. It is significant that the 
first-class institutions took the lead in abolishing the 
classical language requirement. The second-class col- 
leges held on to this requirement longest." 

These figiures do not tell the whole story. Practically 
every college which maintains some modicum of Latin 
for the A.B. degree will admit students without it for 
some other degree, and no great distinction is made 
by the faculty or in the student body between the two 
classes of students. A rapidly increasing number of 
colleges, moreover, tired out by the increasing multi- 
plicity of baccalaureate degrees (the Standard Dic- 
tionary now recognizes some thirty-four of them), 
have returned to the practice of awarding a single 
degree, and make no requirement of the classics with 
reference to it. Professor Holland Thompson has 
recently made a study of the one hundred and six 
colleges generally regarded as the best, and finds a 
strong tendency to make the A.B. simply a certificate 
of the completion of any course of general study. 
Even the ''Yale Alumni Weekly" asks "whether the 
time is not ripe at the older colleges to reorganize their 
curricula so as to give the classics their proper and 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 57 

more or less * elective' place, and face the modern 
world with a more modern graduation requirement?" 

In all this movement the classical people have 
questioned, not without some show of reason, why 
their particular subject of study should bear the brunt 
of all the attack. An equally bad case might be made 
out, they claim, for college algebra or many another 
subject. One reason why the set is so strong against 
them is because for years they have enjoyed the bul- 
wark of a heavy protective tariff, which, though it held 
back the inundation for a while, made it all the more 
severe when the flood-gates burst open. They had 
basked in seeming security while the newer subjects 
had to fight their way for the attention and interest 
of the student, and while mathematics, the other gen- 
erally protected subject, has had the benefit of vigor- 
ous criticism from the teachers in the many fields for 
which a mastery of elementary mathematics is pre- 
requisite. 

The more progressive teachers in Greek and Latin 
look forward to a period of more genuine and scholarly 
interest, during which the quality of the students tak- 
ing these subjects voluntarily will more than make up 
for the former quantity under compulsion. Some of 
them — but, alas, very few — are considering the edu- 
cational possibilities that are offered by English trans- 
lations of the classics. It is all very well to quote 



58 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Professor Shorey that a translation is a type of gas- 
log culture, but as another professor has pointed out, 
what about the beauty and grandeur of the Old Testa- 
ment prophecies and psalms if translations are taboo? 
For who to-day reads Hebrew? Under the stress of 
war conditions the movement in the same direction 
abroad, which had previously been much less rapid, 
has gone on apace. Compulsory Greek has already 
gone by the board at Cambridge, and A. C. Benson, 
although long a classical teacher, writes that there is 
no place for both languages in our education to-day. 
Greek is for the specialist onJy, and Latin, too, must 
go except for boys of linguistic gifts. 

Side by side with the elimination of the old require- 
ments has gone a less conspicuous, but educationally 
more important, movement toward the admission of 
new subjects of study for credit toward admission or 
graduation. A list has been published of one hundred 
and sixty-six possible secondary-school subjects, each 
one of which makes its plea for college recognition. 

Taking the colleges of the country as a whole the 
attitude toward new subjects to be offered for admis- 
sion has been pretty generous, partly as a result of 
open-mind edness and a realization that the schools 
have their own problems of national importance, en- 
tirely apart from preparation for college; and partly,' 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 59 

doubtless, owing to a zeal for numbers. The most 
generous statement as regards elasticity in the re- 
quirements for college admission will be found, per- 
haps, in the catalogues of Stanford and Chicago. In 
the latter, for example, no subject other than English 
is prescribed. The candidate is required to do a certain 
amount of consecutive work in high school in order 
that he may meet the requirement of a major of three 
units and a minor of two units. A free margin of five 
imits is permitted, "whereby progressive schools may 
develop courses of instruction that seem particularly 
valuable, either for the purpose of meeting the needs 
of individual pupils, or for the purpose of meeting 
special demands of the community." 

The full influence of the war will probably not be 
felt at first. Indeed, it has been pointed out that the 
current of educational change is running far more 
rapidly in England than it is here. There the daily 
and weekly press is giving more attention to education 
in a single month than was ever devoted to it in a 
single year before the war. 

As far as the student himself is concerned in his 
choice^of a college, the whole question of the particular 
subjects that he must study to enter or to graduate is 
relatively unimportant as compared with a correct 
answer to questions like the following: Is this college 
a place where the faculty believes in the vitality of the 



6o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

subjects which it teaches, rather than in the divine and 
literal inspiration of any particular technical pro- 
gramme for a degree, — a programme which in all 
probability it will change in a year or so, — and does 
the faculty make this belief contagious among the 
students? Are new subjects of study included because 
they are popular, or excluded for the same reason? Or 
has the faculty tried to probe the underlying causes 
and the probable duration of the popularity, and been 
guided accordingly? 

Perhaps I have confused and wearied my readers by 
all these classifications, but I know no other way to 
bring home the truth that the question of going to 
college for any given boy is not simply to be answered 
by a "yes" or a "no." It is not simple even if the 
answer is "no," because there are now many other 
agencies to teach the same subject-matter, even 
though the environmental conditions may be differ- 
ent. While the example of the Workingman's College 
in England, to which Kingsley, Ruskin, and Tom 
Hughes gave so much time, has not been followed 
here, the Young Men^s Christian Association has al- 
ready established a North-Eastern College for part- 
time students in Boston, and other interesting experi- 
ments are in progress. If, on the other hand, the 
answer is "yes," there is a variety of choice which de- 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 6i 

pends on what the boy in question is like, his general 
ability and reliability, his health, his dominant inter- 
ests, and perhaps most important of all, his ambitions. 
Contrary to general impressions, most boys who have 
the energy to find their way to college have a pretty 
definite idea as to what they want to do with their 
lives, and it is the exception rather than the rule for 
these ideas to be changed during college residence in 
any fundamental particular. 

In spite of its conspicuousness, primarily in fiction 
and to a less degree in fact, the group which includes 
the students who just drift to college and, to con- 
tinue the nautical figure, remain there, so to speak, '^in 
stays,'' is really of secondary importance. The typical 
college boy, down at the bottom of all his overlying 
mass of convention and pretense, has a definite idea 
as to where he is headed, and in particular whether he 
is going to continue his formal education after gradu- 
ating from college. It is for this reason that the most 
important decision, after that between a real and a 
sham institution, is between the separate college and 
the university college. As I have shown, the most 
rapid growth to-day is in the latter group. A study of 
their student bodies will show that the typical student 
in them is headed toward some profession, that he 
realizes that the worth-while professional schools de- 
mand at least two years of college preparation, that 



62 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

he wants a college degree, but proposes to "save a 
year'^ or so by taking a combined course. Though the 
professional option may theoretically be defended as a 
radical development of the group system, this com- 
bined course is an illogical arrangement, a typical 
Anglo-Saxon compromise to meet a real need. Where 
no such option is provided, — as, for example, at 
Harvard, — the tendency is marked for men to take 
extra courses while in college in order to complete the 
requirements within three years. Besides the economic 
and social disadvantage of postponing too long the 
entry into professional life, there is a real question of 
mental and physical plasticity. Most young men are 
in a better position to grasp the elementary principles 
of law at twenty than at twenty-four, and there is no 
question that the dexterity which plays an important 
part in the equipment of the surgeon, the architect, 
and the engineer, is acquired more readily and usually 
more thoroughly by the younger student. 

The two professions in preparation for which com- 
bined courses play a relatively minor part are the 
ministry and teaching, and with these may be grouped 
finance, which is only recently being recognized as a 
profession, because, in the absence of good academic 
training, preparation for it had almost universally to 
be acquired through apprenticeship — just as law and 
medicine were learned by our grandfathers. If we now 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 63 

study the membership of the separate colleges, we find 
that the number of boys with definite professional 
plans for the future is smaller, both actually and rela- 
tively, and that those who have such plans are rather 
likely to be headed toward the pulpit or the profes- 
sor's chair, or toward Wall or State or La Salle Street. 
Of course we all know many men who have prefaced 
a course in the Harvard Law School, for example, by 
graduation from WilHams, or who take the A.B. at 
Hamilton before going to Johns Hopkins Medical 
School, but in the enormous mass of students prepar- 
ing the country over for professional careers these 
men are relatively few. 

I am told that at Princeton before the outbreak of 
the war four sevenths of the seniors were undecided 
as to what they would do after graduation, and this, in 
normal times, would usually have meant their going 
into business; and at Dartmouth, from which during 
earlier years seventy-seven per cent entered the minis- 
try, law, or teaching, over sixty per cent have recently 
been going into business each year. 

The separate colleges are suffering from the drain of 
serious-minded and able boys to the university col- 
leges. One important element in the growth of the lat- 
ter is the migration from the former of sophomores and 
even juniors who are headed toward the professions. 
At Columbia, for example, we admit every year one 



64 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

hundred or more such boys. It looks as if the near 
future will provide another Anglo-Saxon compro- 
mise which will permit a student in one of the separate 
institutions to spend the senior year, and possibly the 
junior year also, on leave of absence at some profes- 
sional school, returning to graduate with his class on 
the basis of having completed during his leave a pro- 
gramme of approved professional studies. A fair 
number of colleges are already trying out this scheme 
experimentally, but the practice has not yet become 
sufficiently general to influence the attendance upon 
either type of college. 

Of course there are counterbalancing factors in 
favor of the smaller college, factors which should have 
turned the scales for many a boy now in the univer- 
sity. In the first place, such energies as the separate 
college possesses are concentrated on the undergradu- 
ates, whereas in the complex university organization 
the particular needs of the college are sometimes over- 
looked, with the result that it is likely to get what is 
left over after graduate and professional needs are 
satisfied. 

For many a boy the prairie or the New England 
hills, "the tranquil hills, that took me as a boy and 
filled my spirit with the silences," would mean more 
than the opportunities to see new plays and hear 



PRESENT-DAY COLLEGES 65 

symphonies. It is not damning the country college 
with faint praise to commend it because its students 
are less likely to be over-stimulated. Many a boy who 
is ready to enter college is not ready for the turmoil of 
ideas in which the university will immerse him. Many 
a shy and awkward boy would be brought out socially 
in the gregariousness of the rural college, who, unless 
he is specially looked after, will remain tongue-tied 
and gauche in the university. 

In general the boy of striking ability and personaKty, 
provided his health is good and his nerves are steady, 
will make a far better investment of his youth in the 
city university. In the smaller college, with its slower 
pace, he would be marking time; he would have, for 
example, far fewer opportunities for contact with pro- 
ductive scholars. The most distinguished of these men 
are often really fond of undergraduate teaching. In 
Columbia College, no fewer than five of the small 
number of men who constitute the National Academy 
of Sciences offer elementary courses for undergradu- 
ates. The boy of this type can also profit by the library 
and laboratory facilities, and by the more vivid stimuli 
furnished by the city environment. The potency of 
these environmental influences is shown by the strik- 
ing number of graduates of city colleges who have 
made music or the drama their profession. 

For the boy of less strongly marked characteristics, 



66 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

it would in many places be ** playing safe " to send him 
to a country college, particularly if his previous sur- 
roundings had been in the city, and it must not be 
forgotten that our national proportion of city dwellers 
has now risen to fifty per cent. 

Institutions in a smaller city often provide a good 
compromise between the two types. Life is more stim- 
ulating than in the coimtry. Much that is worth while 
in drama and music comes sooner or later and can be 
enjoyed by the student who knows how to plan his 
time. On the other hand, Hfe is simpler and usually 
cheaper than in the great city, the country is nearer at 
hand, and, finally, since the relation of college and 
collegian is more vital to the smaller city, the element 
of lodal pride in the home institution can have fuller 
play. In many small cities membership in the college 
body provides in itself a very pleasant entry to the 
social Hfe of the city. Where a choice is possible, the 
student planning to enter a college of this type should 
select a city possessing a backgroimd of culture, Hart- 
ford, for example, where Trinity College is located, 
or Crawfordsville, the home of Wabash College. 



CHAPTER III 
THE RAW MATERIAL 

Twenty-seven years ago Andrew Carnegie stated 
publicly that "the almost total absence of the college 
graduate from high positions in the business world 
seems to justify the conclusion that college education 
as it exists is fatal to success in that domain. The grad- 
uate has not the slightest chance, entering at twenty, 
against the boy who swept the office, or who begins as 
shipping clerk at fourteen." To-day great organiza- 
tions Hke the Standard Oil Company and the National 
City Bank literally bribe promising college graduates 
to learn their business by paying them a living wage 
long before they can be of any practical value to the 
organization. 

Of course there still exists the successful business 
man who decries college on the ground that he himself 
succeeded without it; but he forgets that the compe- 
tition which his boy will meet in his generation is not 
that of non-college men, but of men who in the great 
majority of cases will have had college training. Even 
though some of these skeptics may divert boys who 
would otherwise go to college, their number is far out- 
balanced by the fathers to whom college was ambition 



68 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

unfulfilled, and who make great sacrifices to send their 
boys to college in order that the latter may be able to 
bridge the gap that lies between the foreman and the 
superintendent, or, for the more prosperous, to know 
the difference between the outside and the inside of the 
right club. 

That is one reason why there are hundreds of boys 
in American colleges to-day where there were half- 
dozens when Mr. Carnegie spoke. Another reason for 
the increase is that a college education, or, to be more 
accurate, college experience, is now regarded as essen- 
tial for what is known as a place in society. This was 
not at all the case a quarter-century ago. In those 
days going to college was still regarded as something 
of an enterprise, even for a boy headed toward a 
profession, since most of the prospective lawyers and 
doctors went straight into a professional school. 

To-day no ambitious fellow who is looking forward 
to professional life will forego a preliminary college 
training if he can possibly find the means to obtain it. 
The only exception is engineering, and here also the 
tendency is becoming marked to follow the example of 
the older professions as to preliminary general training 
for young men who really wish to be professional en- 
gineers in the sense that the term is used in Europe. 

I do not mean that every parent who sends a boy to 
college, or every boy who makes his own way there, 



THE RAW MATERIAL 69 

has decided upon the step as business or professional 
preparation, or as social insurance. Many boys come 
from sheer imitativeness or inertia without the shght- 
est attempt to think the question through. But what- 
ever the reason, or lack of it, the greatest single prob- 
lem which faces our American colleges to-day is the 
embarrassing wealth of raw material; and if the reader 
wishes to make a play of words upon rawness and 
materialism, it will not lead him far afield. 

As a matter of fact, the whole movement has gone 
too far. People do not distinguish between the man 
who went to college because he was of the succeeding 
type and the man who succeeded because he went to 
college. Too often conditions are made easy for those 
who, either because of a lack of general ability or be- 
cause their dominant interests lie in other fields, ought 
not to be in college at all, students who are in college 
to the detriment of the opportunities of those who 
could really profit by the college career. The public at 
large does not make much distinction between going 
to college and doing well there. Parents who have 
boys remember that out of the last nine presidents of 
the United States eight were college men, but they for- 
get that these were all high-stand men. The five who 
went to colleges where a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa 
was estabhshed all earned election to that society. 



70 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The impulse to go to college, which' was formerly 
confined to people of intellectual background, has now 
spread through all classes of the community. The 
great gifts to education by the National Government 
under the Morrill grant and by the States to their 
universities have helped many men to realize that 
higher education is not a luxury for the few, but a 
right for all classes of the community. The recent 
establishment of three thousand scholarships of one 
hundred dollars each in the State of New York for the 
boys and girls graduating from the public high schools 
with the highest standing has to my personal knowl- 
edge sent a number of talented boys to college who 
would otherwise have never been able to overcome the 
parental inertia. What moved the parents was not so 
much the money grant, though that was important, 
as the fact that the Commonwealth had, so to speak, 
officially invited their sons to take part in an enter- 
prise fostered by the State. 

College-bred men always send their boys to college 
if the latter can pass the entrance examinations, and 
college-bred women see that their boys succeed in do- 
ing so. It is, of course, regarded as the thing for a man 
to send his son to the institution with which he has 
been identified; witness the outcry in Kansas when 
Governor Stubbs sent his boys to an Eastern college. 
But fashions change in colleges as in other matters. 



THE RAW MATERIAL 71 

In a recent entering class at Princeton more than 
eighty different colleges were represented among the 
parents. 

Loyal alunmi are also on the alert to send on promis- 
ing boys outside of their own families. A recent study 
of the entering class at Dartmouth showed that this 
had been by far the most important factor in the 
make-up of the entering class. The figures there were 
as follows: Influence of relatives, forty- two; influence 
of Dartmouth graduates and undergraduates, one hun- 
dred and forty-one; location of the college, forty-six; 
other factors, seventy-nine. Only five boys confessed 
to athletics as the dominating influence. 

Other reasons determining why a boy should go to a 
particular college are various. Sometimes it is cold- 
blooded social ambition on the part of the boy or his 
parents, sometimes a chance remark of the girl of the 
moment. Most often I think it is the influence of close 
school friends who have already made up their minds, 
and without whose constant presence life, as the candi- 
date looks down the years, offers a very dismal pros- 
pect. It is amusing to observe how seldom these 
continue to be the boy's intimates in college. The 
influence of the newspapers, I think, is rather toward 
getting boys to college in general. Certainly the insti- 
tutions that they play up most conspicuously as to 
athletics do not seem to reap any numerical benefit 



72 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

therefrom. Another potent influence is the boy's fa- 
vorite teacher or his school principal. In private schools 
this affects only the question of the particular college 
the boy shall attend, since to-day practically all pri- 
vate-school boys are headed toward college. Ten years 
ago I was one of a group interested in the organization 
of a boarding-school where boys of very limited means 
might enjoy that particular type of training. We ex- 
pected that the education of a large share of them 
would of necessity stop with their graduation from the 
school and planned accordingly; but to-day almost 
without exception its graduates go to college as a mat- 
ter of course. In the public schools, however, the situ- 
ation is different, and here men like Superintendent 
Greenwood, of Kansas City, and other leaders, have 
done much to turn the thoughts of boys and girls 
imder their influence to college training. 

Twenty-five years ago the private schools provided 
the great majority of college material, but to-day con- 
ditions have entirely changed. There are now 1,300,- 
cxx> pupils in the American high schools, with an aver- 
age daily attendance of about one million, certainly a 
sufficient supply from which the colleges may draw so 
far as numbers go; but in the high school of the better 
type only one third of the entrants are likely to gradu- 
ate, and in one particular case less than seven per cent 



THE RAW MATERIAL 73 

of the enrollment continued their formal education 
beyond the high school. I think that the establishment 
of junior high schools, of which there are already more 
than two hundred scattered throughout the country 
and of which there will be more in the near future, 
will have its effect in increasing the supply of college 
students. Certainly these schools, which make the 
seventh and eighth years of training far more interest- 
ing, succeed in holding for further education boys of a 
type that used seldom to go to the high school at all, 
and the number includes many of real ability. 

Some of the best college material does not come di- 
rectly from the secondary school at all. The normal 
schools, for instance, supply many excellent students, 
most of them girls, but an increasing nimiber of first- 
rate boys. Others get their preparation through eve- 
ning extension classes or Y.M.C.A. schools, or are 
really self-prepared, or coached by some kindly clergy- 
man or doctor. It is fortimate that there are these 
other means of preparation for exceptional students, 
because, according to Cooley, seventy-five per cent of 
the total school population is imable for economic rea- 
sons to complete the secondary-school course without 
interruption. In the stronger institutions many of the 
new students each year have already had one or more 
terms of college training. The total number of such 
transfers to Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard alone is 



74 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

nearly one thousand annually, those to Chicago alone 
coming from more than two hundred institutions. 
The development of the jimior colleges will doubtless 
increase this source of supply. 

Still another type is represented in the colleges — 
the boy who cannot get through school, but is finally 
landed in college through the efforts of highly paid 
tutors. As these boys seldom manage to remain be- 
yond the freshman year, it is a question whether the 
process is worth while, except for the tutors. Although 
there are notable exceptions, especially from schools of 
the type of Andover, Groton, and Hotchkiss, the high- 
school boy nearly always outstrips his fellow-student 
from private school. This shows not so much the in- 
feriority of the private school as the fact that only the 
more ambitious boys go to college from the public 
schools, whereas the business of the preparatory school 
is to get its good and bad material alike into college. 
Of course there are exceptions, but in general the 
teaching is not nearly so good in the private schools; 
and this is natural enough considering that head mas- 
ters are likely to ignore the benefits of professional 
training for their teachers and to pay far lower salaries. 
One of the many pungent remarks with which Presi- 
dent Eliot is credited is that to the head master who 
asked querulously whether Mr. So-and-So was the 
best teacher of English with which Harvard could pro- 



THE RAW MATERIAL 75 

vide him. "He is the best teacher I am willing to 
recommend for the price you are willing to pay." 

From what has gone before it may be gathered that 
the colleges no longer draw from a selected group in 
the community. To-day absolutely no class is unrep- 
resented. One of the most interesting and satisfactory 
students under my care, for example, was formerly an 
I.W.W. agitator who has frequently been boarded and 
lodged at government expense. Taking the coimtry 
over, I suppose there is hardly a hamlet or a city 
block which does not contain some college man, past, 
present, or prospective. 

Not long ago an old college teacher showed me a 
letter from one of his former students at the University 
of Kansas, a widow, who, at the time she wrote, was a 
rural-school teacher, doing all her own work for a 
family of six at home and driving eight miles every 
day to her school. From her letter it was clear that she 
was planning to send her five children to the State 
university as a matter of course, and did not regard 
this as anything extraordinary. Indeed, it was the 
Middle West that first made going to college a thor- 
oughly democratic proceeding. 

Statistics as to the occupations of parents of college 
students have recently been gathered at various in- 
stitutions. Those at the Pennsylvania State College, 



76 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

for example, show the following percentages : twenty- 
one merchants; eighteen industrial and manufactur- 
ing; eighteen artisans; seventeen agricultural; twelve 
professional; five clerks, etc.; three public officials; 
six miscellaneous. An analysis of a recent freshman 
class at Princeton showed that the fathers of the stu- 
dents represent fifty-six different occupations. Eighty- 
five were in business, presumably merchants; fifty-five 
were manufacturers; there were thirty-nine lawyers, 
thirty bankers, twenty physicians, nineteen real-estate 
men, nineteen ministers, eleven insurance agents, 
eleven brokers, eight professors, seven chemists, and 
six farmers. One hundred and twenty-nine of the 
total of four hundred and thirty are sons of college 
graduates, and two hundred and thirty-eight come 
from families in which neither parent is a college grad- 
uate. If some one would collect information showing 
the training and present occupation of the elder broth- 
ers and sisters of students now in college, this would 
bring out even more strikingly the rapidity of the 
movement in the direction of college training. 

Of course, this wide background means an equal 
variability in the financial status of college students, 
who range from the sons of multimillionaires to boys 
whose presence in college seems an absolute miracle. 
The rich include not only the inhabitants of the " Gold 



THE RAW MATERIAL 77 

Coast** at Cambridge, but the sons and daughters of 
farmers who in bumper years come rolling over the 
prairies in high-powered motor-cars to the State imi- 
versities of the Middle West. Taking the country as 
a whole, however, the wealthy student is the rare ex- 
ception. Most parents who pay the college expenses 
of their children do so at very considerable inconven- 
ience; and in spite of scholarship provisions (which are 
likely to err on the side of generosity), as we all know, 
a very considerable number of boys pay their own ex- 
penses in whole or in large part by simimer work and 
incidental employment during term-time. How gen- 
eral this is, however, may not be so well known. At the 
University of Montana more than half the students 
are primarily self-supporting. At Washington Univer- 
sity in St. Louis the proportion is between one third 
and one half. Even at colleges like Princeton and Wil- 
liams it is probably as high as twenty per cent. 

Self-supporting students fall into two groups, those 
who continue to earn money in some calling in which 
they have already had a preparatory training, and 
those who have to subsist on incidental jobs about the 
college or obtained through the college employment 
office.^ Of the two groups, the former are likely to be 
the more interesting. From my experience at Colum- 
bia I can select the following at random: bootblacks, 
hospital orderlies, taxidermists, vaudeville performers 



78 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

and "jokesmiths," professional baseball players (I 
mean openly professional), window-dressers, Pullman 
porters, tree doctors, theatrical managers, and, most 
extraordinary of all, a dressmaker. We hear much to- 
day of the University of Cincinnati plan of half-time 
students for technical training; but every college has 
such students, the only difference being that at Cin- 
cinnati the boys work in pairs, spending week about 
in shop and classroom, whereas in the other cases the 
student himself finds what he calls a half-portion job 
or obtains one through the college. 

The young men who come to college after a business 
experience fall into three groups. Some never get the 
"feel" of the place at all; some celebrate their eman- 
cipation from the shackles of office hours by a com- 
plete irresponsibility; and only a few exercise any of 
the much-needed influence on their fellows toward 
that most important factor in a well-ordered college 
Hfe, the orderly planning of time. 

In addition to the self-supporting student there are 
very many who come to college on borrowed money, 
sometimes secured by a life-insurance policy. Per- 
sonally I wish this were more generally done, because 
many of the self-supporting students really get the 
shadow rather than the substance of a college training. 
Merely as a matter of investment the boy's earning 
capacity after graduation is relatively so much greater 



THE RAW MATERIAL 79 

that this factor also ought to be taken into considera- 
tion. I see no reason why a vigorous boy should not 
work during his summer vacation; but during term- 
time he ought at least to get enough sleep and enough 
recreation and enough time to prepare his college work. 
Where it is impossible for a boy to borrow money, he 
oijght at least to be willing to take a lighter schedule of 
studies than his fellows, even at the cost of spreading 
his work over five years. This, unfortunately, he is 
uniformly most reluctant to do. 

The wide range in parenthood means not only great 
differences on the financial side, but great variety in 
parental attitude toward the boy in college. The 
nouveau-riche makes it clear that money is no object, 
that tutors are to be purchased ad lib, I have even 
known a case where a father attempted to bribe a col- 
lege officer in order that his son might be permitted to 
continue his liberal education. Then there are the 
fathers who are obviously convinced, sometimes 
doubtless on excellent grounds, that their sons are 
entirely unreliable, and who write or call to check up 
every statement which the boy may make about his 
college work. Any college officer can tell of the tragic 
cases of parents who have sent stupid boys at great 
sacrifice to college and who simply cannot be made to 
understand that for them this is a most unwise invest- 
ment, parents who, no matter what one may say, point 



8o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

in reply to other boys, the sons of friends, whose col- 
lege success has raised the whole family in the social 
and financial scale. 

Parents who are obviously interested only in their 
son's social and athletic progress, and who care little 
or nothing as to what he does with his lessons, so long 
as he is not dropped, are unfortunately all too common. 
Sometimes, on the other hand, we come into contact 
with a father, or perhaps of tener a mother, who is a real 
intellectual companion for the boy. The two go over 
his work together, and the parent makes it a point 
to know and talk with as many of the boy's teachers 
as possible. 

No discussion of the raw material of the American 
college of to-day would be complete without some ref- 
erence to the foreign students. These foreign students 
make a very striking total. At the last summer con- 
ference of the Young Men's Christian Association, 
for example, there were three himdred and thirty of 
them in attendance, divided among more than thirty 
nationalities. There is, I think, a tendency to over- 
exploit these foreigners as a group; but the best of 
them are worthy of all that we can do for them. 
These students include both the foreign-bom and the 
American-bom who come from homes where Eng- 
lish is not the mother tongue. The presence of the 



THE RAW MATERIAL 8i 

latter is natural enough, but the number of young 
men who have come even during the war from foreign 
countries to America for their higher education is 
a very striking phenomenon. Boys have come from 
the ends of the earth to America as a result of the 
influence of the missionary schools and colleges, but 
the greatest single influence was the decision of the 
Chinese Government (in recognition of the return by 
the United States of the so-called Boxer Indemnity) 
to send over the picked young men of that nation to 
America for their training. The number of such stu- 
dents who have already come over and returned, or 
who are here at present, is over a thousand. Several 
agencies are now at work to increase the nimiber from 
South America and, just now, from Mexico; and many 
colleges offer scholarships for this purpose. 

The university colleges are particularly cosmopoK- 
tan in their make-up. In the undergraduate body at 
Columbia, for example, it is easier to make a list of the 
nations of the world which are not represented than of 
those that are. The two most extraordinary cases in 
my experience were a young Zulu nobleman, one of a 
group of four who went for training to France, Ger- 
many, England, and America respectively, as a prep- 
aration for serving their own people; and a member of 
the Hova tribe in Madagascar who proposed to become 
a professor of Scandinavian languages! Of the foreign 



82 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

students the most able just now are the Chinese, per- 
haps because they represent the aus lese^ as did the 
Japanese who came here thirty years ago, or our own 
early pilgrims to the German imiversities. 
' How recently the men of the second generation — 
and this term really includes those who came here in 
childhood with their parents — have come to be im- 
portant academic factors may be realized when we 
think that in 1890 there were only two Italian lawyers 
and seventeen Italian physicians in New York City. 
To-day any Columbia graduation list would contain 
from one hundred and fifty to two hundred Italian 
names. The Portuguese, Bohemians, and Greeks are 
also beginning to make their mark. There are enough 
of the latter, by the way, to organize their own inter- 
collegiate Helicon. 

Of the second generation I should give the palm to 
the Italians, even above the Jewish students (whose 
parents now come nearly altogether from Russia and 
Austria). And this brings us to the general question 
of the Jew as an element in the student population. 
Until recently they represented no particular problem. 
The handful of Jews who went to college were readily 
absorbed in the student body and were judged as indi- 
viduals and not as members of any particular race. 
The early records of the fraternities which are now 
most exclusive all show a sprinkling of Jewish names. 



THE RAW MATERIAL 83 

The change came after the enactment of the May 
Laws in Russia in 1882, which not only greatly in- 
creased the number of Jews coming to the United 
States, but profoundly changed the social type. There 
are at present, it is estimated, some three milHon Jews 
in the United States; and, thanks to the racial realiza- 
tion of the value of training and to their almost in- 
credible persistence, the share of these who are in col- 
lege is far above the average of the population at large. 
The presence in a college of a "Jewish problem," 
which means a situation where the Jews are not readily 
assimilated, is really a compliment, though sometimes 
an embarrassing one. The Jew more than any other 
group looks upon the college course from the point of 
view of an investment. Both the young fellow and his 
parents know exactly what he could have been earning 
in the years he spends in college, and they see that he 
spends them under the most favorable possible condi- 
tions. One will find very few of them in the poorly 
equipped colleges. For this reason, although the total 
proportion throughout the colleges is said to be less 
than four per cent, the figures in certain institutions 
will run much higher. The Jews being essentially 
urban and domestic, their presence in large nimibers 
was felt first in the city institutions; but with their 
settling in the small towns throughout the country and 
the rapid increase in wealth of those remaining in the 



84 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

large cities they are now being much more generally 
distributed among the stronger institutions. 

The college boy is much nearer to being a man, cer- 
tainly so far as age goes, than he used to be. According 
to President Sharpless, the average age of boys at 
entrance to-day is just short of eighteen and a half. 
This is nearly two full years above the age forty years 
ago, and four or five above that of one hundred years 
ago. Of course, the requirements for entrance have 
increased greatly in the meantime; but the average 
age is nevertheless much too high, our boys being 
about two years older than those of equivalent training 
in France or Germany. The situation, however, is not 
as bad as it seems. Under the present social pressure 
many a dull boy goes to college even though he has to 
wait until twenty or twenty-one before he can enter. 
Such boys, I may say in passing, very seldom appear 
in the statistics of graduation. Many boys of ability 
and good preparation are forced for economic reasons 
to stay out of college and work for two, three, or even 
more years. These conditions mask the encouraging 
fact that the tide has really turned, and that for boys 
of good ability and uninterrupted preparation the 
normal age is now not much above seventeen. This in 
spite of the fact that the conventional elementary and 
secondary-school programme in the United States is 



THE RAW MATERIAL 85 

twelve years and that boys very seldom begin school 
before sbc. Indeed, the statistics available show no 
correlation between early going to school and early 
entrance to college. Boys of ability should not, and in 
growing numbers they do not, spend twelve years in 
the conventional lock-step. Professor Russell, of 
Peabody College, once tried an amusing experiment, 
and a very instructive one, at an educational meeting 
at which I was present. He asked all those in the room 
who had spent twelve years in school to raise their 
hands. There were very few. Then he asked for those 
at eleven, ten, and so down. It was perfectly evident 
from the results that the normal period of school prep- 
aration of the group, nearly all of them teachers, was 
not twelve, but somewhere between eight and nine 
years. With the growing realization of the waste of 
time, particularly in the upper grades of the elementary 
schools, it will be progressively easier for the able boy 
to go ahead at his normal speed. 

Dr. Boris Sidis has given us an example of sending a 
normal boyish boy to Harvard at eleven. This is, of 
course, exceptional; and the group figures recently 
published by Professor Jones, the Director of Admis- 
sions at Columbia, are more significant. He shows 
that of 287 freshmen admitted direct from second- 
ary schools in September, 191 5, thirty-three entered 
before their seventeenth birthday. These boys, it may 



86 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

be remarked, did not go direct from the cradle to 
the elementary school. Most of them entered school 
at six or seven and only one had completed the tradi- 
tional twelve years of preparation for college. Profes- 
sor Jones took the college grades of each of these age- 
groups and compared each group with the average of 
the class as a whole, with the following results: the 
fifteen-year-old boys made the best showing in schol- 
arship, and the sixteen-year-olds the next best, both 
being well above the average of the class. The figures 
for seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are near that of 
the class average, but are progressively poorer as the 
age increases. Twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two- 
year-olds are very much worse than the average. 

As against the prevalent idea that there is danger in 
forcing young boys ahead too fast, the general feeling 
to-day among experts is that this danger is negligible 
in the case of boys of good health and normal nervous 
organization. We must remember in this connection 
that our school period, both as to hours in the day and 
days in the year, is much shorter than that prevailing 
elsewhere in the civilized world. Dr. Charles L. Dana 
has stated that in all his wide experience as a nerve 
specialist he knows of no instance of injury to a boy of 
normal make-up from overwork in school, and he im- 
plies that most boys are far more normal than their 
parents think them. My own experience, which in- 



THE RAW MATERIAL 87 

eludes painful hours spent with at least two or three 
positively insane boys each year, makes me beheve 
that the chance of nervous derangement is not neg- 
ligible, and I should hesitate to press a boy of my 
own beyond what appears to be his natural gait until 
I had taken expert advice upon the subject. 

It is not only what a boy can do, but what he will 
do, which concerns us in college. Every entering class 
contains its boys who come prepared to do their best 
entirely regardless of the presence or absence of col- 
lege machinery to make them do so, and others who 
will do only what they positively must. The great 
majority, of course. He between these two poles and 
can be guided in either direction by the conditions 
which they find in college. One type of boy for whom 
I do not think we make sufficient preparation in our 
scheme of things, but who is not at all rare, is the boy 
whose strength is artistic rather than intellectual; the 
boy, for example, to whom music is the real language 
of expression, or the one to whom a great picture will 
mean more than any book on the shelves of the hbrary. 
One of our problems for the future will be a closer 
study of boys of this type and of provision to make 
college a more stimulating place for them. 

Even with the hordes that we get to our colleges 
every year, we college people are still unsatisfied, and 



88 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

it is n*t wholly a vulgar thirst for numbers. We know 
that we are missing some of the best material. For 
example, there are the boys who still go straight to 
schools of engineering and agriculture. It is not pos- 
sible to draw the line very closely, because many of 
these schools are more colleges than professional 
schools and include many ''liberal'^ studies in their 
programmes. We believe, however, rightly or wrongly, 
that a boy who misses the college environment misses 
also a certain breadth of intellectual curiosity and 
sympathy, not only from the subjects taught, but in a 
wider range of interest among the students with whom 
he is thrown in contact. 

Then, we miss many if not most of what are called 
"eye-minded boys," who from the nature of their men- 
tal make-up are so bored with the auditory and mem- 
oriter methods that they almost invariably drop out 
of school before graduation. Some of these, as is evi- 
denced by their success in later life, are boys of very 
great ability. To these should probably be added 
many of the artistic type already mentioned, who are 
less likely to go to college than are other boys of equal 
general ability. K our present entrance and promotion 
tests fail to recognize the able boy who happens to 
have difficulty in reasoning with symbols as contrasted 
with concrete things or human individuals, we must 
find some way of improving them. There is no ques- 



THE RAW MATERIAL 89 

tion that there are such boys, just as there are many 
otherwise highly competent who are tone-deaf or 
color-blind. I believe, personally, that the "flunkers" 
and low-standard graduates to whose success in later 
life so much attention is called are primarily of this 
type. In our desire to stamp out the athletic evils 
which came with the special student, we must be care- 
ful not to exclude this chance of admission in the case 
of the poorly prepared boy of striking ability. 

While the problem of expense offers little real diffi- 
culty to the able boy who has only himself to consider, 
there are many cases of boys of high intellectual prom- 
ise with widowed mothers or others dependent upon 
them, who realize the value of the college investment, 
but cannot afford to make it. Some generous bene- 
factor should establish a fund to let exceptional boys 
in these circumstances go on with their training, by 
giving or advancing an amount to cover the expenses, 
not only of the boy, but of the family. 

We have spoken of the reasons which have brought 
the raw material to the portals of the college, of its 
variety in racial, social, and economic status, and 
other matters. What, now, can we count on a particu- 
lar freshman's knowing? The only safe answer is that 
he knows enough to get into that particular college. 
Over and above that, the supply ranges from practi- 



90 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

cally zero to an astonishing amount of both general 
and special information which some boys carry packed, 
often inconspicuously, about their persons. The for- 
mal part of learning, even the most elementary parts 
of formal knowledge, are often lacking. Freshmen, or 
at any rate thousands of them, cannot spell, their 
grammar is very erratic, they cannot add or subtract 
nearly so well as they can pad and distract, and 
as a whole their capacity for making accurate obser- 
vations and drawing conclusions therefrom is all too 
limited. 

What they know outside the formal range depends 
nowadays more on the fashion of the moment than on 
the old-fashioned conception of what every boy should 
know. The bicycle and telephone have had their day, 
and now the automobile and wireless are giving way 
to the airplanes and submarines. On the other hand, 
a boy who can tie up a respectable parcel is, indeed, a 
rarity. The popularity of summer camping is increas- 
ing the number of boys who know some little about 
nature, but their numbers and the amount of their 
information are still distressingly small compared with 
that of the boy from the old New England farm or the 
pioneering West of two generations ago. Their knowl- 
edge of the usages of good society, or at any rate their 
practice of them, is conspicuous chiefly by its absence; 
but, of course, we are in the midst of a period of great 



THE RAW MATERIAL 91 

carelessness in these matters, and the boys should not 
be blamed too much. 

To me the most interesting and important thing 
about the bulk and range of our raw material is the 
high variability which it signifies. In order to get one 
boy of vivid personality and striking ability any col- 
lege should willingly endure scores who really do not 
belong in college at all. The colleges that consciously 
or unconsciously appeal only to a certain type lose the 
chance of getting the exceptional boy from any other 
type, and I am inclined to think from their own type 
also; for the intelligent boy, no matter what his social 
status, wants to find a different horizon line at college 
from the one he left at home. The effect of the pres- 
ence of such students is not solely upon one another; 
they exercise a very great stimulating influence upon 
the teachers, by meeting them on a common plane of 
intellectual competence, and this is breaking down the 
last of the barriers that stood for so long between the 
faculty and the students in American colleges. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE UNDERGRADUATE POINT OF VIEW 

What are the factors, conscious and unconscious, 
which guide the common conduct of a student body 
within the walls of some particular college, a group 
consisting as it does of individuals whose variety I 
have tried 'to picture in the foregoing chapter? On 
the whole, the unconscious factors are the more im- 
portant, and among them we must recognize first the 
general collegiate traditions which have hardened into 
the intense conventionaHsm of much of undergrad- 
uate acting and thinking, to which is superadded the 
store of local traditions of each particular college, and 
finally we must not forget the influence of the non- 
collegiate fashions of the day, and of our permanent 
American attributes — if we have any which are really 
permanent. 

Leaving out for the moment the influence of the 
faculty and of the studies (sometimes they are left out 
for more than the moment), we will try to see how 
these varied elements fuse into college life so-called, a 
strictly American product. Whether I succeed or not, 
I shall at any rate try to avoid dogmatism. 

There is, of course, great variability among the dif- 



POINT OF VIEW g^ 

f erent colleges, and even in the most convention-ridden 
ones there are always startling exceptions to any rule 
that may be laid down. Under some vivid stimulus the 
real boy not infrequently breaks through the conven- 
tion. Some few students seem quite unaffected by the 
prevailing mode, and if such boys possess quaUties of 
leadership they are likely to start new traditions and 
conventions for their successors. In general, it is not 
easy to overestimate the influence of the college-life 
environment. Being an undergraduate has almost 
become a career in itself. It affects many boys far too 
much; we hear of the college putting its stamp upon a 
boy, sometimes it stamps so hard as to crush all indi- 
viduaHty out of him, and there is nothing to which a 
boy has a clearer right than to his personality. 

At present our college life receives considerably more 
blame than praise, but, nevertheless, it is being sedu- 
lously cultivated by the authorities even of technical 
institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 
nology. There are many pitfalls in the way of an ade- 
quate presentation of it. In the first place, a conven- 
tional and inaccurate picture has already been built 
up. I am not referring to the picture of newspaper 
humorists, though this, perhaps, influences more out- 
siders than we realize, and may keep some hard-headed 
men from permitting their sons to go to college. I am 
thinking rather of an equally mythical undergraduate 



94 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

who has been set up by critics, internal and external, 
for the purpose of knocking him down, and who has 
about as much real existence as the *' economic man," 
I admit that such a figure has considerable superficial 
accuracy, but being a man of straw, his internal anat- 
omy is far from correct. There is really no such animal 
as the typical college student. I don't say that the 
actual product is any better, but I am sure he is differ- 
ent. Even when one tries honestly to get at the actual 
boy, there are difficulties in the way. One of the most 
potent of student conventions is that the undergradu- 
ate should keep his inner, or real, self and his outer self 
in separate compartments, — just as many a business 
man keeps his office and his home life, — and if only 
one compartment is visible, no true picture can be 
drawn. 

The professional stories, long and short, which deal 
with college life range from the extravagances of 
Fitch to the subtleties of Flandreau, but college life 
changes so rapidly that all, even Owen Wister's classic 
"Philosophy 4," are likely to give a wrong impres- 
sion of present conditions. These college stories have 
a significance, however, not from their truth, but in 
the fact that they are eagerly read by schoolboys and 
under-classmen and in this way tend to fix the con- 
ventions of conduct and speech. 

One can get some light, however, by reading be* 



POINT OF VIEW 95 

tween the lines in editorials and other products of col- 
lege journalism, always remembering that what stu- 
dents ostensibly write about is not necessarily what 
they think about; and by taking advantage of the 
cases where one gets to know a boy well enough to 
penetrate the outer integument. 

In studying our American college life of to-day, we 
must remember that the roots of its non-intellectual 
side go very deep into the past. Boasts "History of 
Oxford" shows that hazing was a recognized student 
activity in the Middle Ages, and youths in training 
for the priesthood wrote songs beginning, '^Magis 
quam ecclesiam diligo tabernam." Or take the follow- 
ing from John Addington Symonds's translation of 
another mediaeval student song: — 

"Cast aside dull books and thought; 
Sweet is folly, sweet is play; 
Take the pleasure Spring hath brought 
In youth's opening holiday! 
Right it is old age should ponder 
On grave matters fraught with care; 
Tender youth is free to wander, 
Free to froHc light as air. 
Like a dream our prime is flown, 
Prisoned in a study; 
Sport and folly are youth's own, 
Tender youth and ruddy." 

In considering our own development in the United 
States, we must again remember that the early college 



96 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

students were not men, but boys, and that they were 
controlled in a manner which was then, and is still in 
certain places, regarded as the proper way to treat 
boys. As a result most of college life consisted in more 
or less organized pranks against the authorities. Even 
the drinking-bouts and the cock-fighting were, we may 
assimie, carried on more to annoy the faculty than to 
give pleasure to the students. In pondering over the 
mysteries of sophomore-freshman ructions, we may 
remember that the Statutes of King's College, adopted 
in 1763, include the following: *'The junior students 
shall pay such respect to the seniors, and all of them 
to the president, professors, fellows and tutors as the 
said president (etc.) shall direct and under such pen- 
alties as they shall think proper to prescribe." 

The Revolution and the half-century following it 
brought few changes in undergraduate life except that 
literary societies were organized, where the boys in- 
dulged in pompous debates. For the boy who did not 
join these, and who had no turn for mischief, college 
life must have been pretty empty. There was evi- 
dently none of the modem get-together spirit. Some 
years ago I sent an inquiry to the oldest Kving alumnus 
of Columbia, about another member of the class of '27 
(which numbered thirty-six students), regarding whom 
the editor of the Alumni Catalogue desired informa- 



POINT OF VIEW 97 

tion. My letter brought the reply that, since the stu- 
dent in question "sat at some distance from me in the 
classroom, I had no personal acquaintance with him." 

Shortly after this period came the fraternities and 
other social clubs, and by the thirties there was cer- 
tainly a pleasant life, both intellectual and social, — to 
judge by such documents as Edward Everett Hale's 
diary, in spite of the fact that the students were evi- 
dently treated like children by the authorities. 

It was still a very simple life, however, and it would 
be interesting if space permitted to trace the steps 
which have led to the over-elaborate complexity of the 
present day. Not long ago I received a pamphlet from 
the University of North Dakota, an institution with 
fewer than two hundred and fifty male collegiate un- 
dergraduates, containing the treasurers' reports of 
thirty-seven different student organizations, and one 
could doubtless find an even more impressive record 
if he looked for it. When we remember that at every 
college there is a considerable number of men who take 
little or no part in these activities, we can realize what 
the burden must be on the really prominent student. 
There has recently been published a record of the time 
spent by the students of Purdue University in student 
activities during senior year. Four men reported more 
than four hundred hours each, and their records do not 
include fraternity duties and pleasures, nor, naturally, 



98 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

'* girling," which is coming to make heavier and heavier 
demands on the time of most undergraduates. I should 
say that I have no personal acquaintance with these 
particular young men. They may be anchorites, but 
they probably are not. 

No wonder that the faculties and student councils 
are trying to develop plans to give the boys some relief 
from their diversions! 

I have had the privilege of seeing a "chromatic 
diary" kept by one of this year's seniors in a New 
England college — an ingenious device whereby the 
author, by the use of chalks of divers colors to indicate 
different occupations, has recorded in half a dozen 
pages how each hour has been spent for an entire col- 
lege term. I commend the "chromatic diary" to the 
boys who are letting their time run away from them. 
In general this document shows a pretty well-balanced 
ration — regular attendance in the classroom with 
plenty of skiing and tennis, time for class and society 
duties, church, three days at the Smith Prom, followed 
by increased correspondence, some earning of money, 
and even some study, increasing sharply in intensity 
in the fortnight before examinations. Certainly an 
absorbing way in which to spend one's days, but with 
little time for reflection. The pathetic thing about it 
all is that the world at large was never a more interest- 
ing or exciting place than it is to-day, and that stu- 



POINT OF VIEW 99 

» 

dents of this type, evidently boys of real ability, were 
until the outbreak of the war so busy with little things, 
many of them artificial survivals or imitations, that 
even if they managed to keep up their formal college 
duties, they certainly had no time to ponder on the 
big things all about them. 

It is apparently the human tendency for any system 
to go on elaborating and complicating its machinery — 
take chivalry or any one of the great religious systems 
as an example — until some new factor breaks in like 
a beetle into a spider's web, with suflScient force to 
crush the useless threads and enable the organism to 
start afresh. I am in hope that the growing sense of 
social responsibility may do this in our colleges. The 
ante-bellum rush to miHtary training was a manifesta- 
tion of a real desire to be of service to a larger com- 
munity. 

Yet after all, in this instinct for conformity lies a 
certain practical value. The almost universal turning 
of our undergraduates to military and other forms of 
service since the outbreak of war reflects in many cases 
a serious personal sense of responsibility, but the fact 
that these heedless boys rose practically as one man 
reflects the training of the group to do something 
when "everybody's doing it." 

The way in which every fall a college can absorb and 



loo THE UNDERGRADUATE 

mould to its pattern a body of new students half as 
great as the total of those returning is miraculous in its 
speed and thoroughness. Imitation is not only the 
sincerest flattery, but it is the most powerful single 
factor in hiunan conduct. The speed with which a 
freshman, even one who has not learned the tricks of 
the trade at school (where conditions are coming to be 
nearly as elaborate as in college), will put on the gen- 
eral appearance and manners of the college man in 
general, with the particular shades appropriate to his 
college in particular, is simply marvelous. And there is 
always a real boy underneath it all which it is the 
business of the faculty to "get at." It repays the 
teacher and the executive to know the students and 
their folk-ways. Like the ductless glands in our own 
bodies certain elements in the student organization 
perform functions of an importance only appreciated 
when something goes wrong with their workings. 

This process of imitation also spreads from college 
to college in these days of "following the team" and 
of fraternity and religious conventions. Not only do 
tricks of speech, costume, and manner spread quickly 
over the country, far more rapidly, it may be said in 
passing, than educational ideas spread from faculty to 
faculty, but the complexity of student life is greatly 
increased by the blind copying of student activities, 
and the element of distinctiveness, which is what our 



POINT OF VIEW loi 

student bodies chiefly lack, seems harder of achieve- 
ment than ever. I remember my sorrow when I saw 
at the University of Virginia, an institution which had 
always cast a glamour over my youthful imagination, 
a game of football with the University of Georgia on 
a day so hot that some of the players went without 
stockings, with a young Virginia gentleman acting as 
cheer-leader and performing all the conventional an- 
tics of the calling. The Weather Bureau sometimes 
records a difference of as much as one hundred and 
thirty-four degrees between the temperature in Florida 
and in Montana on the same day. Why should all our 
colleges over this broad land feel that they must have 
the same sports at the same seasons? Complexity does 
not bring color and spontaneity, and these are the 
qualities which are the scarcest in our imdergraduate 
life. It is hard to think of an activity of the student 
body in a man's college that is really sui generis. I can 
think only of the ski-running at Dartmouth, and some 
of the outdoor pageantry of the Pacific Coast colleges. 
In this matter of originaHty the college girls make a 
much better showing than their brothers. 

Like imitation the closely related quality of emula- 
tion is a tremendously strong incentive to youth. We 
had an amusing example at our one hundred and fifti- 
eth anniversary at Columbia. The Japanese students, 



I02 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

in recognition of the event, made a graceful gift of 
some characteristic object of art, which was duly re- 
corded in the press. The next day an equally hand- 
some gift appeared "from the Chinese students." It 
was only by accident that we foxmd that there was but 
one Chinaman in the institution at the time, and that 
he had done the whole thing himself. Emulation is 
beautifully developed in athletics and in fraternity 
rivalries, but it is hard to get it working effectively 
in other fields. While President Lowell and others are 
endeavoring to hitch it as a motive force to the stu- 
dent's intellectual tasks, undergraduates are trying to 
find means to do the same for many non-athletic activ- 
ities. In some cases, indeed, the tradition is well estab- 
lished; the men "heeling" for the "Yale News" have 
to give their word that they will cease their labors at 
I A.M., if I remember correctly. In the Middle West 
the "oratorical" contests arouse great rivalry. The 
whole machinery of managers and assistant managers, 
about which there is incidentally more buncombe than 
about most college activities, manages to keep the can- 
didates busily "scudding" about on often trivial and 
useless tasks. In general, however, we can observe 
elaborate systems of insignia for non-athletic service, 
and stirring editorials to demonstrate that even though 
nature has not endowed you with the equipment for 
athletic success, there are still ways in which you can 



POINT OF VIEW 103 

serve your college. Some of us had hoped that the 
growing tendency of undergraduates to come to sum- 
mer courses, where every one seemed to get along com- 
fortably without the conventionalities of college life, 
might prove to be a help, particularly since the sum- 
mer course had already done something to show how 
much faculty machinery is unnecessary. The effect on 
student life however has been the other way about, 
and the summer life is now becoming rapidly con- 
ventionalized. 

A whole book — and it would be a very dispiriting 
one — could be written about these conventionalisms 
of undergraduates. The few examples that I shall give 
vary in virulence from college to college and from year 
to year, but they affect very nearly all students some- 
what, and far too many they affect very seriously. To 
begin with, there is the convention of unconvention- 
ality, which accounts for much of student bad manners 
and slovenliness. An enterprising business manager of 
a college newspaper, for example, in the laudable en- 
deavor to increase his subscription list, recently sent a 
circular letter to the professors in his college and in a 
single page succeeded in including thirteen examples of 
bad English. It is to this convention that we owe so 
much silly profanity and pseudo-picturesqueness of 
conversation. When the Lingua Franca of the student 



I04 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

body is made up of local words and phrases, some of 
an antiquity entitling them to certain respect, one 
may allow some claim to justification on the ground 
of picturesqueness, but when it is culled wholly from 
musical comedy and baseball reports with a flavoring 
of profanity and other liberties, as is too often the 
case, it is a pretty dreary business. The use of such 
a language in many cases does not imply a weakness 
of legitimate vocabulary, but is an example of sheer 
imitativeness, and many boys can without apparent 
effort jump from one language to the other. 

Secondly, there is a convention that all their pleas- 
ure is in college life and that nothing will interest an- 
other student except its details. A student must not 
be seen in the act of doing college work except just 
before examinations. To this is related the convention 
that a student attends class only because he has to, 
and hence that a man must take all the cuts allowed 
him each term or he will feel himself disgraced. I have 
personally never seen any difference between deliber- 
ately using up one^s cuts at the end of a quarter and 
throwing away the last two of a dozen tickets because 
the railway offers no objection to one^s doing so. Pro- 
fessor Erskine is on record as saying that the only ad- 
vice which the average student will take from his duly 
constituted academic adviser is as to how to avoid 
inconvenient faculty regulations. They exhibit extra- 



POINT OF VIEW los 

ordinary stoicism in the face of academic regulations 
which they see no way of evading, apparently regard- 
ing them as part of an elaborate and quite inexplicable 
faculty rite, bearing no relation whatever to their own 
education. This convention that the faculty is hard- 
hearted and uninterested is sheer vestigial survival 
from the old days, and results in what seems to be a 
willful blindness on the' part of many students to its 
new attitude. I remember in the pubHc schools that 
the sHghtest degree of poHteness to the teacher was 
branded as the crime of " sucking around teacher,'' and 
was, of course, carefully avoided. Many of our under- 
graduates seem to have the same attitude. At the 
same time they are careful to take full advantage of all 
the favorable evidences of faculty paternalism. Pro- 
fessor Carl Becker has written a delightful skit de- 
scribing a colloquy between the "Faculty's Conception 
of the Student" and the "Students' Conception of the 
Faculty," which ought to be included in the prescribed 
reading not only of all conventionally minded stu- 
dents, but of all conventionally minded professors. 

One of the most trying conventions is that of insula- 
tion from the world. Even last fall, with the great war 
in progress and a presidential election at home, I ven- 
ture to guess that a dictaphone placed under many a 
fraternity dining-table would have recorded little but 
athletic chatter, girls, and plans to circumvent some 



io6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

particular rival. The conventions of luxury give us the 
elaborate fraternity houses, in sharp contrast to the 
austere buildings of the German student clubs, and 
the fussy dormitory rooms which compare so badly with 
the students' rooms at Oxford. Even the self-support- 
ing student is often working for luxuries he would be 
better without. 

The preternatural solemnity of class proceedings, 
from the moment when a solemn junior turns over the 
first class meeting to a super-solemn freshman, the 
lugubrious songs which most colleges select as favor- 
ites, and the cheering and other forms of hollow mer- 
riment, often most depressing of all, are all sheer 
convention. The convention of conformity is a tre- 
mendously strong one. A boy must do nothing to 
queer himself, whatever happens. Many a student 
would refuse a thousand dollars if it were offered on 
condition that he should wear a celluloid collar for a 
week and not be able to explain that he really knew 
better. The most poisonous convention of all is that 
of vice and disorder at certain predetermined times 
and places — the Sophomore Triumph, for example. 
Sometimes one is almost tempted to think the better 
of a boy who if he must needs get drunk, does so on 
his own hook. 

The desire to "do something for the college" is not 
all convention by any means, but a lot of convention 



POINT OF VIEW 107 

is mixed up in it, as well as the personal desire to see 
one's name in the Year-Book and elsewhere in print. 
It takes boys who could really accompHsh something 
worth while in scholarship and fritters away their time 
in a distressing way. The head master of one of the 
boarding-schools tells me that his school is periodically 
visited by undergraduate missionaries from a well- 
known college, who explain to his boys that at this 
college everybody does something. If they are unfitted 
by nature and training to ^'go out" for anything else, 
they at least go out for reHgion. 

Before blaming the boys too seriously, we had better 
look about us and observe how much of our own lives 
is ruled by conventions which are often quite as ab- 
surd. There may be some primordial instinct within 
us all against which it is vain to struggle. Why, other- 
wise, should a thousand selected men behave at a 
presidential nominating convention in such a way as 
to remind us of totems and taboos and all the other 
marks of the most primitive culture? 

In our moments of optimism we may discern signs of 
a limit to the growth of college conventionalism, even 
of a change for the better. No matter how rankly they 
shoot upward, the trees do not actually grow into the 
sky, and we can never tell when the wind will blow 
down even ^he tallest and stoutest-looking of them. 



io8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The right influence can promptly break up a local con- 
vention which has every outward appearance of being 
deep-rooted. I have more than once seen a single man 
attack and conquer a cult of dirty story-telling, for 
example. 

Particularly in the university colleges — where there 
is almost danger of a convention of iconoclasm — more 
and more men are holding forth like Mr. Owen John- 
son's protagonist in " Stover at Yale,'' in college rooms 
or college papers, and are getting more serious atten- 
tion than the hearers and readers are usually ready to 
admit. Perhaps the promptitude with which nearly 
every undergraduate put away childish things with 
the call to arms last spring may come to be recorded as 
marking a new order by the academic historian of the 
future. 

One great hope is in the development of men with a 
sufficient sense of humor and sufficient tact in its exer- 
cise to get the victims of a convention to laugh at 
themselves. And in this connection students may well 
ask themselves how a man may hope to gain the power 
to smile in misfortune, if he inhibits and finally loses his 
power to laugh at absurdities in undergraduate days? 
A convention can stand moral denunciation far better 
than it can a temptation to snicker on the part of its 
devotees. We can watch the whole process in the case 
of the secrecy and ritualistic aspect of fraternity life. 



POINT OF VIEW 109 

Nothing had a more authentic pedigree, back to the 
very childhood of the race. In nothing here in Amer- 
ica do the boys' parents set a clearer example with 
their lodges and badges and watch-charms, or the col- 
lege itself with its elaborate pageantry at commence- 
ment. The very keystone of the whole edifice was 
Tap Day at Yale, a ceremony which for brutal dis- 
regard of the sufferings of the unselected can find its 
parallel only in Central Africa. And yet Tap Day, 
the historic Tap Day, at any rate, has gone — and I 
venture to say that it was an inner realization of the 
absurdity rather than of the immorality of the pro- 
ceedings which brought about its downfall. 

A real sense of humor among students is rarer than 
they themselves realize. College comic papers have 
many amusing jokes, but they nearly always depend 
upon verbal ingenuity rather than upon any realiza- 
tion and expression of the deep-lying incongruities of 
human nature. There are glaring instances at every 
hand of an absence of a sense of the ludicrous, the 
presence of which one might expect more naturally 
than of a sense of humor. One of the senior societies 
at Dartmouth, for example, has a clubhouse in the 
form of an Egyptian tomb, and the members appar- 
ently see nothing to detract from its impressiveness in 
the ob\aous presence of electric-light wires. I should 



no THE UNDERGRADUATE 

not condemn the members to Cimmerian darkness, — 
even the shrine of the temple of Abu-Simbel is lit by 
electricity to-day, — but the boys might have buried 
the wires. Present-day student *' stunts'' are likely to 
be elaborate and stereotyped rather than spontane- 
ous and amusing. To find anything like the brilliant 
blagues of the French university student, we have 
to go back twenty-five years to the historic Am- 
herst gymnast who walked on his hands across the 
campus, to the confusion of the poor professor who 
had turned his classroom into a camera obscura with 
a pin-hole through the window curtain, in order to 
demonstrate the reversal of the optical image. 

But if college students are weak in humor they are 
strong in sentiment. It is true that this often degener- 
ates into sentimentality — witness the maudlin dirges 
already referred to; but none the less, there is a fine 
body of wholesome and sincere, if sometimes naive, 
sentiment for alma mater and for one another. Such 
a feeling will turn out a whole college to work like 
navvies upon the grading of an athletic field or, more 
heroic, in soHciting for the endowment. It is the force 
which so often enables a boy to do better than he knows 
how in some contest in which he holds the honor of the 
college to be at stake, or to galvanize into life a dying 
magazine or inanimate fraternity chapter, or to per- 
form acts of unobtrusive unselfishness for a fellow- 



POINT OF VIEW III 

student, utterly inexplicable on the basis of his in- 
adequate home influences and careless college life. It 
is the force which last spring turned such a large pro- 
portion of our students into the Aviation Corps. 

Institutional sentiment usually seeks some focus, 
from the group of moth-eaten elms at one end of the 
continent to the lone polo alto at the other. It may be 
a mountain, or a fence, or a lake; at Missouri, it is a 
line of classic columns, — all that is left of the original 
college building; at Princeton, a half-buried cannon 
(whose condition of complete unpreparedness does not 
seem to have struck the students). Sometimes, though 
more rarely, it is a man, — Mr. Jefferson at Virginia, 
for example, — or even a living professor, as when 
**Van Am" was dean at Columbia. Whatever the 
symbolic object is, it is a potent force in pulHng the 
whole student body together. 

Any human group divides naturally into leaders and 
followers, and the significance of the former is nowhere 
greater tlian in the college community, in which no 
type of historic or mythical leader has not had his 
counterpart. We all know the Napoleons of the cam- 
pus or the Metternichs, and many an Eastern college 
has been carried off its feet by some young Lochinvar 
come out of the West. Sometimes a college will be 
ruled with a rod of iron by a cold-blooded fellow of the 



112 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Parnell type, — a cat who walks by itself, — or by a 
conscientious bore whose only asset is an inhuman 
capacity for work. Often the ruling genius operates 
behind a more ornamental and impressive figurehead. 
Undergraduates are such chatterboxes that by con- 
trast the silent man has often great influence, regard- 
less of whether the silence comes from reserve or from 
the absence of anything to say. 

I think it is only exceptionally that a student sets 
out deliberately to be a leader. He is much more likely, 
if he seems ''to have the goods," to be pushed forward 
by an elder statesman of his fraternity. Once in a 
while, however, we have a boy who has thought out 
his whole plan of campaign in advance, and who, for 
example, deliberately refuses fraternity invitations in 
order that he may have the neutral vote when he needs 
it later on. No matter how a student gets started, it is, 
of course, only human nature for him to fight to retain 
his leadership when he has once achieved it. It is in- 
teresting to watch the procession of leaders in any 
class during the four years of its undergraduate exist- 
ence. In freshman year, authority usually rests with 
the older boys, particularly those who have had the 
training of boarding-school Hfe and the athletic prow- 
ess that counts so largely with their fellows. As time 
goes on, however, these are almost sure to be out- 
stripped by the younger and naturallj^ more able boys, 



POINT OF VIEW 113 

usually by those whose sense of responsibility and in- 
itiative outweighs the lack of social and personal 
and athletic advantages. Other leaders who come to 
prominence later on come from the class of students 
that has had some " down- town ^' business experience 
between high school and college. 

The greatest college leaders — men like Marshall 
Newell at Harvard or Gordon Brown at Yale, to men- 
tion two who have died in early manhood — come from 
the small group who "have everything to begin with 
and promptly acquire the rest/' but too often the boy 
who starts with all the incidental advantages settles 
back comfortably into the position of a chronic fol- 
lower. I have sometimes thought that the rigidity of 
our entrance tests has its share of responsibility for the 
appalling nimaber of "trailers" in our Eastern colleges 
to-day. These tests can be passed by docile following 
of the tutor, but they often deter men of the impatient, 
individualistic type from entering an examining col- 
lege, often from entering college at all. 

Of course, in any community there are some mem- 
bers who from lack of ability and personality are pre- 
destined to a place in the background, but many and 
many a trailer has the qualities which fit him, if not for 
positions of large leadership, at least for a responsible 
and useful position in some field of college service. 
Sometimes these boys can be spurred into action, but 



114 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

it must be done promptly, for long-continued trailing 
completely dulls the sense of personal responsibility. 

The student's sense of honor is a real thing in spite of 
its extraordinarily illogical and incongruous manifesta- 
tions with respect to matters of intellectual honesty 
and the like. Before we laugh these out of court, we 
must remember how widely standards of right and 
wrong differ throughout the civilized world, and the 
almost equally wide range of environments from which 
the boys come, to say nothing of a peculiarly unpromis- 
ing background for the development of intellectual 
honesty in the evolution of the American college. 

We all come upon cases of conduct by boys which 
seem utterly "out of the picture," and we usually find 
that the student in question is living two separate lives 
and shutting off all stimuli not affecting the life which 
he is living at the moment. We see boys turning a 
blind eye — or perhaps it would be more appropriate 
to say a tightly held nose — to patent athletic evils, or 
to evasions, as they appear to outsiders, of solemn 
fraternity agreements. We have cases of the bribery of 
a monitor of easy virtue, or the deliberate misplacing 
of a reference book in the library so that the trans- 
gressor alone can find ii when he wants it. Detailed 
consideration of only one or two examples of these sur- 
prising manifestations is all that space permits. 



POINT OF VIEW 115 

The honor system in examinations, which is dealt 
with elsewhere in this book, is pointed to as evidence 
of the higher standards of students in matters of 
honesty in college studies, but even this system ad- 
mirable as it is, so far as it goes, seems often to be 
carefully deposited in a water-tight compartment. 
Students customarily make the same kind of ethical 
distinction that their fathers do in matters that are 
*'law honest." By keeping the letter of the law they 
think they fool the teachers, when they only fool them- 
selves. This obvious fact, that it is always himself and 
his fellows that the student cheats, and not the college, 
seems never to be a factor in student conduct, except 
that it is usually regarded as discreditable to cheat in 
competition for a prize. The old attitude of hostility 
to the faculty, and the f eehng that the student through- 
out is playing a game in which it is quite as legitimate 
to use one's wits as it is in baseball, have much to do 
with their present conduct. Take, for example, the 
beautiful instance of the party of Harvard sophomores 
joyously playing poker in the middle of a room, while 
four freshmen, commandeered for the purpose, were 
placed at its corners, simultaneously reading aloud 
the four books which constituted the prescribed read- 
ing in some course of which the poker-players were 
members. 

We must not forget, indeed, that faculty demands 



ii6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

are often unreasonable and the marking system for 
checking these demands is sometimes of the stupidest. 
The punishments prescribed for student misdemeanors 
are nearly always either too heavy or too light to be 
effective. And then there is the fact that there is really 
no sharp line — and undergraduates need very sharply 
marked lines to keep them on the path — between a 
chance shot or a clever bluff in recitations and down- 
right dishonesty. There are unfortunately academic 
parasites who prey upon students and help to corrupt 
them. Take, for example, the following from a printed 
circular which by some accident found its way into my 
mail: — 

RESEARCH ON A SPECIAL PHASE OF A SUBJECT 
— Here we take some topic of your theme which you 
wish specially developed, and assist in working it out . . . $2 . oo 

COMPLETE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBJECT —We 
contemplate in this work the full development of the 
outHne or brief, supplying references, and finally read- 
ing, criticising and revising the paper in which you have 
elaborated the outhne. Our suggestions will enrich the 
product, but the product is to be your own $3.00 

As regards hazing, the object theoretically to be at- 
tained is worthy enough. In these days of spoiled only 
sons. Heaven knows that every freshman class con- 
tains its share of members who need dressing down. 
There are prigs, and sissies, and poseurs (^'jonquils," as 



POINT OF VIEW 117 

they are called at Yale), who must be dealt with if life 
in their vicinity is to be endurable. There are also the 
more important members of the community who have 
the makings of excellent college material, but whose 
abiUty is smothered by conceit, or who are just un- 
bearably "fresh." Good-natured "jollying" of such 
folk is really an excellent thing, and most freshmen are 
not in the least averse to being singled out as worthy 
of treatment. Personally I do not mind when a fresh- 
man is sent into my office by some astute sophomore 
for his gymnasium towels or for a reserved seat in the 
chapel. When the question of abolishing "horsing" 
was up at Princeton not long ago, several of the pro- 
fessors came out publicly in favor of its retention. 

The trouble has always been that treatment of this 
kind almost invariably degenerates into cowardly 
bullying of any freshman, just because he is a fresh- 
man. This may or may not do the freshman good, but 
it certainly does the sophomores harm. In its most 
brutal forms hazing is now doomed, because after the 
faculties, supported by public opinion as expressed 
by letters and editorials in the press, had struggled 
unsuccessfully with the problem for generations, the 
students themselves are finally grasping the elemental 
fact that it is really a manifestation of cowardice and 
it is now generally regarded as an attribute of the 
"mucker college." 



ii8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Dead conventions die slowly, however, — if I may 
be forgiven the Irishism. Rough horse-play at initia- 
tions, really a form of hazing, has practically disap- 
peared in the colleges whose conventions are usually 
copied most slavishly, but it will probably persist for 
years in nooks and corners. As to the bullying of fresh- 
men, those who believe that with the elimination of 
actual brutality this matter ceases to be important 
should read a recent editorial in the ** Independent." 
This points out that while tying men to the railroad 
track or burying them alive is not a pastime "in 
which one is apt to find delight after his sophomore 
days, the habit of imposing one's will upon others in 
the matter of dress and conduct is not so easily out- 
lived. A man who has been allowed to dictate to 
younger and less educated men what color neckties and 
socks they shall wear, what they shall sing and where 
they shall walk, is apt to carry into later life the belief 
in class distinctions and intolerance which his college 
training has given him." 

Class fights or rushes have the support of the most 
authentic historical tradition, and it is an excellent 
thing for the new students to stand shoulder to 
shoulder and to learn to work together. College at- 
tendance, however, is no longer limited to those who 
are, technically speakings gentlemen, with the instincts 
of the sportsman, and this fact, with the enormously 



POINT OF VIEW 119 

increased size of the classes, has made the game so 
dangerous that it is no longer worth the candle. It is 
bound to follow hazing, although the conventional 
traditionalism among students is so strong that a col- 
lege usually has to suffer a fatal accident, like that at 
Pennsylvania last year, before student opinion is suffi- 
ciently educated to bring about abolition. Perhaps we 
can hit upon some safe and sane substitute for the in- 
discriminate *' scrap,'' but the attempts thus far lack 
spontaneity, and, indeed, are so hedged about with 
rules and oversight as to be bores to all concerned. 

Of course this college life varies in its intensity. In 
some colleges there is literally little else doing; in some 
others, particularly city colleges where the boys live at 
home, the home life smothers the college life. In the 
stronger city institutions which draw a number of their 
boys from a distance, there is usually an active college 
life of the traditional sort embedded in the surround- 
ing mass, and it is usually a life of a pretty good sort, 
because from the nature of the case its insulation is less 
complete. 

College girls have developed their own conventional 
life, and in the West I understand that this is as much 
of an academic problem to the authorities as is that of 
the boys. In the East the girls are more conscientious 
about keeping up their college work; they put more 



I20 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

emphasis on the activities which have an intellectual 
content, and the possession of brains is much more of 
an asset so far as student prominence goes. As I have 
already intimated, the men's colleges could learn 
much to their advantage from a study of the life in 
Barnard or Bryn Mawr or Vassar. 

If I were asked to name the three things which col- 
lege life ought to do, and too often fails to do, I should 
say, first, to improve student manners; second, to in- 
culcate a spirit of hiunan charity; and third, to develop 
habits of personal responsibility. Of course the three 
merge into one another, but it may be possible to em- 
phasize each separately. 

Bad nianners come from selfishness or ignorance, or 
both, for most selfish persons are sublimely uncon- 
scious of the fact. Each year I have to remind several 
boys, who are doubtless really fond of their mothers, of 
the propriety of occasionally writing home to them. 
Superficial tricks of speech or gesture don't constitute 
good manners. The boarding-school boy who calls the 
dean "sir " at the end of every sentence and apologizes 
for taking his time, but who neglects to answer his 
letters and invitations, is a case in point. It seems 
hopeless to try to make students see that the anonym- 
ity of the mob gives them no leeway in their personal 
standards. Boys who would as soon think of flying to 



POINT OF VIEW 121 

the moon as of whistling at a girl from the window of 
their own homes, will do this from the window of a 
classroom — but will desist when it is explained that 
such action gives the college a bad name. This mob 
psychology has to do with most of a student's sins of 
commission, and a complete lack of conscience and 
method about time and its inexorable flight, with his 
sins of omission. A recent essay, "In Defense of Good 
Taste," by a Columbia undergraduate reminds me how 
rare is an intelligent appreciation of this quality, and 
how much more subtle and personal it is than mere 
good manners. 

Every college boasts of its democracy and does so 
sincerely, but the students very seldom realize how 
broad democracy really is. They point to the fact that 
the rich boy's dollars are really a detriment to his so- 
cial progress, and that the boy who waits on table is 
elected president of his class. But while it is true that 
there is much less snobbery of certain kinds to-day 
than there was twenty years ago, a boy of impeccable 
breeding is ignored socially because he happens to be 
a Jew. It is easy to say that the same things occur in 
the world outside. Indeed, the student's attitude is 
often sedulously fostered by his parents. But I submit 
that in such matters privileged people like college stu- 
dents should lead and not follow. The cultivated Jew 
is not the only type of student who fails to receive his 



122 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

deserts. Take, for example, the boy who before the 
United States entered the war had his own ideas as to 
international matters and who was accordingly cried 
down as a poltroon. 

As I have tried to show in a previous chapter, the 
rapidly increasing number of college students of the 
Jewish race presents a problem that it is particularly 
important for the future welfare of our colleges to have 
solved upon a broad and equitable basis, and it will 
only be so solved when the Jews of social experience 
are given a chance to cooperate. In the meantime, the 
fortitude of such boys in the face of conditions existing 
in some colleges is beyond praise. They are in the 
position of the cultivated American traveler in Europe 
who sees his country judged by the grotesque perform- 
ance, in hotels and elsewhere, of the other kind of 
American. 

When students say democracy, they very often 
mean oligarchy. A group of generous alumni recently 
wished to furnish a smoking-room in one of our col- 
leges, and consulted a prominent senior about their 
plans. He replied, with the unconscious brutality of 
youth, that there was absolutely no use in doing so, 
because that particular room was never used except by 
*'kykes" and other down-and-outers. The "signifi- 
cant" people, of course, had already their clubs to 
go to. 



POINT OF VIEW 123 

Habits of personal responsibility will, we hope, im- 
prove manners and develop democracy, and they are 
sorely needed by most students for other reasons also. 
Any employment secretary can tell of men who really 
need work in order to get through college, but who 
never can be found when work is there for them. It 
would not seem to be too great strain on a man's time 
and attention to call once a day for his college mail or 
to keep in telephone touch with the office, yet this is 
just what they cannot be made to do. A large part of 
the drudgery of the administrative offices is caused by 
these irresponsible men who have no realization of how 
much labor their carelessness causes to others. A sense 
of responsibility need not entail a wrinkled brow and 
a rushing about from one thing to another with fox- 
terrier-like incessancy ; there are men who are responsi- 
ble who look and act in this way, but alas, there are 
many others with these outward and visible signs who 
are not. 

From the foregoing, one might think with the 
Psalmist that "there is none that doeth good, no, not 
one," but in some miraculous way the boys succeed, or 
at least most of them succeed, in being worth while in 
spite of their natural and acquired handicaps, and they 
will be more worth while when they realize that most 
of their handicaps are readily removable. In view of 



124 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

the present tendency on the part of faculties to throw 
increasing responsibility on the students themselves, 
I have hopes that the general movement toward a 
social conscience throughout the country will have its 
effect in due season on college snobbery and shif tless- 
ness . The following, from an editorial in the * ' Harvard 
Crimson," seems to me significant: — 

When a man is put on probation his friends slightly de- 
plore the fact, but seldom do they exert any moral pres- 
sure to impel the man to attend his classes and do the rea- 
sonable amount of study that is required to save him. . . . 
If probation were looked upon as a disgrace, and if a little 
healthy missionary work were done by classmates, — in 
other words, if undergraduates realized some responsibility 
for their fellows, — the sinking probationer would more 
often make an effective effort to reform his ways. 

-^ I don't think the advice and suggestions of parents 
have much influence on the college life of their sons. 
They are too likely to take at its face value the assur- 
ances of the latter that these are esoteric matters in 
which the parent, even though a college graduate him- 
self, can have no real understanding. Out West intelli- 
gent college presidents are beginning to arrange for a 
Parents' Week each year, during which fathers and 
mothers and sons and daughters can all live together 
on or near the campus, and the parents will doubtless 
learn just how much like ordinary existence this mys- 
terious college life really is. For more sophisticated 



POINT OF VIEW 125 

households, I should recommend Mr. Edward S. 
Martinis essay entitled ^'A Father to his Freshman 
Son." Perhaps it may be considered as class advice, 
but it is very good of its kind. For example: ''Show 
respect for people; for all kinds of people, including 
yourself, for self-respect is at the bottom of all good 
manners." Also; *'Go to church; if not invariably, 
then variably. They don^t require it any more in col- 
lege, but you can't afford not to; for the churches 
reflect and recall — very imperfectly, to be sure — the 
religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole 
of our civilization rests. Get understanding of that." 

Along with his less amiable manners and customs, 
the college student has acquired certain qualities 
which it is only fair to place on the other side of the 
ledger. He is really generous of his time, his money, 
his affection, in proof of which any one who has had to 
do with college boys can readily provide his own ex- 
amples. The first, for example, and most eager to take 
part in Belgian relief and in the drudgery of the prison 
camps were American college instructors and college 
students. 

When a stranger is taken in, he is taken in whole- 
heartedly — as is befitting in the country still more 
completely in the pioneering stage than perhaps we 
realize. Americans may go to Oxford, but they cannot 



ia6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

ever be Oxford men, but Englishmen or Germans or 
South Americans can and do become utterly and en- 
tirely Yale or Dartmouth or Pennsylvania men. 

The undergraduate's cheerfulness may mean too 
many over-confident to-morrows as regards his studies, 
but I am sure it helps him when he does study and it 
helps all who come into contact with him. 

Whether the college environment can lay any 
claim to it, or whether it is just an attribute of selected 
young America, I do not know, but in every college 
group there is always some one capable of rising to 
the occasion, whatever it may be, and sometimes the 
occasion requires not only ability and initiative, but 
considerable moral courage. 

The resourcefulness of students cannot be better 
shown than in the ways they earn money to make their 
expenses. The cooperation of the college administra- 
tion in this work has already been described, but no 
employment agent is needed by the pachyderm who 
collects new pipes, and "breaks them in" at a price 
for his more sensitively organized friends, or for the 
boy who finds he can sell his blood from time to time 
for transfusion at the hospital, or that he can get two 
dollars an hour for playing chess with some devotee 
of that game. I actually know of a nimble-footed 
undergraduate who made two thousand dollars as a 
teacher in one summer during the dancing craze. The 



POINT OF VIEW lay 

most extraordinary method of working one's way 
through college of which I ever heard was that of two 
downy-cheeked imdergraduates of Dickinson College 
who would drift down to the hotel at CarUsle on Sat- 
urday night and permit themselves to be lured into a 
poker game by the wicked commercial travelers whom 
they were sure to find there. The boys were not Ah 
Sins, but when they returned to college they usually 
had enough in their pockets to keep the wolf from the 
door until the following Saturday night. 

From this very fragmentary collection of examples 
which I have brought together, it will be seen that 
whatever he may take into his limgs in the classroom, 
the college student breathes a pretty highly charged 
atmosphere outside it. That it is noxious to some, 
there can be no doubt. The failure of the college in the 
case of a boy who becomes a drunkard or a libertine is 
obvious, but such cases are the rare exceptions as com- 
pared with the often unrecognized failures of boys of 
great potentiality to choose, among the many paths 
which college offers to them, the path which will lead 
as high as they are capable of rising. Not one boy in 
five hundred thinks of the "why" of the whole thing, 
and that in college he himself, and not the activities, 
is the important thing. The thing which emphasizes 
how unconscious the whole process is, so far as its edu- 



128 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

cational value goes, is the way a chap stands out who 
enters the various college activities for the experience 
they will give him. I know one able and rather cold- 
blooded fellow who had to work hard to earn the 
money to take him to college and who deliberately de- 
voted money and time he could ill afford to being a 
conventional college man, a task which cost him much 
more effort than did his Phi Beta Kappa; later he de- 
fended himself on the ground that he recognized his 
lack of social experience and since the college life 
seemed to be a recognized and stimulated part of the 
show he took it just as seriously as any other part of 
his course. 

The test for any boy is to look into his heart and see 
if what he is doing is really worth while for him. If not, 
what he is doing is probably not worth while for the 
college; for, after all, the college, as he understands it, 
consists of himself and his fellows. With the develop- 
ment of student responsibility we may hope that the 
leaders, at any rate, will tend to get a clearer percep- 
tion of what student Hfe and participation in it really 
mean, the realization that in college, to quote Professor 
Erskine once more, "are represented all the important 
ideals of civilized man. It is our part to choose our 
ideals and to pay the price, knowing that the essentials 
of our choice will become incorporated into our habits 
and so into our character." 



POINT OF VIEW 129 

In the chapters which follow I shall try to consider 
college life, not as a thing in itself, but in relation to 
other factors, and to venture some prophecies as to its 
future development. 



CHAPTER V 
STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 

In studying the organized life of students to-day 
we must do so in the light of the student psychology of 
which we have been getting some hints in the last 
chapter, remembering, of course, that the student point 
of view is partly innate and partly the result of the 
development of these activities themselves. The most 
important factors to remember are the tendency to- 
ward imitativeness and conventionality, as a result of 
which many forms of activity are established merely 
because they exist somewhere else, and many others 
continue long after any real usefulness has ceased. 
Then there is the element of loyalty which urges boys 
to do something for the good of the college. Almost 
before they are matriculated the freshmen are sorted 
and seized and attacked by the assistant managers of 
the various activities; and while all this makes for 
social acquaintance and often for a very useful train- 
ing, it is often a serious waste of time for the boy of 
intellectual promise. Another factor which confuses 
the issue is the student convention that undergradu- 
ate activities may be talked about and boasted about, 
whereas one must be reticent about his intellectual 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 131 

interests. This convention, which persists among the 
alumni, gives a somewhat unfair picture of neglect by 
the student body at large of the things which presum- 
ably it went to college to gain. 

As a matter of fact, student activities are often 
direct helps to the faculty rather than hindrances to 
it. I don't mean that many boys do not make the mis- 
take of giving the second-best of their brains and in- 
terests to their studies, nor that too many first-rate 
fellows are not dropped out of college as the result of 
over-participation, nor that the timid and inconspicu- 
ous boy who does n't happen to get into activities is 
not, because of their general prevalence, rendered more 
timid and more inconspicuous than ever. What I 
do mean is that many *' concrete-minded" boys would 
not remain to take advantage of the curriculum if the 
curriculum were the only stimulus offered to them, and 
that the sorting-out process which goes on in these 
activities is of advantage, not only to the student body, 
but to the faculty, in bringing to light the student 
with the sense of responsibility, almost the rarest of 
undergraduate virtues, and of singling out the ''four- 
flushers." Later on I shall have something to say about 
the cooperation of the faculty in many activities which 
have a direct vocational and intellectual value and 
also as to the growing movement toward student or- 
ganizations which share with the college administra- 



132 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

tion the general responsibility for the good name and 
usefulness of the institution. 

I shall make no attempt to describe these activities 
in any detail. Any good college Year-Book could do it 
better. Their historic background is somewhat con- 
fused, but two elements, I think, stand out pretty 
clearly. In the first place, the oldest types, the liter- 
ary society, the fraternity, and the informal athletics 
were unconscious attempts on the part of the student 
to make up what the college itself failed to offer, and 
in spite of the overlying mass of conventionalism to- 
day, this educational idea still persists and should not 
be overlooked. Secondly, the activities are, it seems to 
me, in large part the lineal descendants of the old dis- 
orders as an outlet for superabundance of youthful 
activity, and in many cases their natural appeal is to 
boys of the tender years of the earHer undergraduate, 
rather than to the grown men in our colleges to-day. 

Student organizations may be divided roughly some- 
what as follows: There are the groups of students en- 
deavoring to produce or to perform something; sec- 
ondly, there are the clubs, like the fraternities, which 
are now primarily social in character; and finally, there 
is the political machinery of the student body. At first 
this last had almost wholly to do with the class organ- 
ization, but to-day there is usually a general college 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 133 

body, selected by the students themselves and often 
sharing to a very important degree in the general ad- 
ministration of the institution. 

These activities may be divided, in another way, 
between those which are, so to speak, standard, which 
may be found with slight variations in almost any col- 
lege, and those which are local in their character. The 
latter are likely to be the more free from the blight of 
conventionalism. A good example of this type is the 
organization which is composed of teachers and stu- 
dents on practically an equal basis, usually that of 
interest in some intellectual field. 

Leaving athletics for the moment at one side, the 
standard activities of the productive type are those 
having to do with writing, with debating and other 
forms of public speaking, and with musical and dra- 
matic activities. Of these the last seems to me to-day 
the most significant. College journalism, though it 
usually turns out a product that is a great convenience 
to every one in the college, is very much convention- 
alized, and with occasional brilliant exceptions the 
purely literary work of students is very imitative. 
Even the radical essays and editorials are convention- 
ally radical. Debating and public speaking are, of 
course, excellent activities for young men and par- 
ticularly in the Middle West are very highly devel- 
oped; students will voluntarily put an enormous 



134 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

amount of work upon a debate or an oration, but col- 
lege debating seems to me to have developed along 
lines of verbal trickery when it threw off the shackles 
of the old-fashioned, spread-eagle bombast, rather than 
in the direction of meeting the issues at stake frankly 
and sincerely. 

In selecting dramatics for particular praise I am not 
forgetting the awful banality of the average college 
show (which usually completely ignores the wealth of 
local color which the students could find all around 
them in their college life) or the simpering convention- 
aHties of the typical glee-club performance. Though 
these are often the most conspicuous, they are the 
least significant expressions of an almost imiversal 
human instinct. There were many distinct elements of 
the dramatic in the old disturbances and outrages that 
gave them a certain justification even in the minds of 
the long-suffering professors, as there is to-day in the 
planting of the ^Varsity letter high up on the hillside. 

Boys are naturally excellent actors. The schoolboy 
productions of Shakespearean plays at the Riverdale 
School and elsewhere are really extraordinarily good. 
Growing self-consciousness makes some of them, at any 
rate, lose the knack at the college age, but in general 
it is much better retained than is the art of public 
speaking, at which high-school boys are admittedly 
better than collegians. 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 135 

In many of the colleges there is a well-organized 
dramatic society which, notably at Yale and Dart- 
mouth, gives excellent performances. Sometimes one of 
the literary societies, as the Delta Upsilon at Harvard 
or the Philolexion Society at Columbia, makes itself 
responsible for the performances of old plays. As for 
the conventional college shows, the best are on the av- 
erage those of Princeton, Pennsylvania, and the Massa- 
chusetts Institute of Teclmology, where a good deal of 
time which one would suppose should go into the struc- 
ture of bridges and dynamos is given over to dramatics. 
In general the value of these shows is in the social good 
times at rehearsal more than in the pubHc performance. 
College dramatic performances range from impromptu 
slap-stick farce on fraternity meeting nights to the 
most elaborate presentation of modem problem plays. 
They include a number of plays in foreign languages. 
At the larger universities there is always a French and 
a German and usually also a Spanish and an Italian 
play, sometimes even one in Chinese. The perform- 
ances which I myself enjoy the most are those of the 
robust old English comedies, where the taking of wo- 
men's parts by men is all '* in the picture.'* I must con- 
fess that this feature always gets a little on my nerves 
m modem serious plays. Many college graduates, 
whose chief interest as students was in the drama, have 
taken respectable and sometimes distinguished places 



136 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

in professional life after graduation, both as actors and 
dramatists, and the same is true, though to a less de- 
gree, in music. 

A number of students are genuinely and intelligently 
interested in the problems presented by the extraordi- 
nary development of the moving picture. I should be 
glad to see a company of college boys try the experi- 
ment of setting up their own studio and laying out a 
film play of college Hfe, with themselves as the actors. 

A very important part of the organized activities 
of the college is that connected with the religious life. 
This, however, had best be dealt with in connection 
with the general religious and moral conditions in 
colleges. 

The incidental and often accidental organizations 
among students are frequently unknown to the more 
prominent imdergraduates, but I believe they are 
among the most important elements of the whole. 
They are more likely to develop at the larger institu- 
tions. In the small college, except for incidental mor- 
tality, the material stays put. Everybody knows what 
everybody else is doing and what he ought to be doing. 
In the larger places there is a constant weaving in and 
out of human material, and on the whole the pressure 
of the conventional activities is less strong. This 
means of necessity less intimate general contact, but 
groups of boys thrown together accidentally from the 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 137 

fact that they live in the same entry, or board at the 
same table, develop all sorts of interesting little groups. 

— I myself have most pleasant memories of a Sabbath- 
Day's Journey Association — it was easier in those 
days to get away from the city pavements in New York 

— and also of a body which modestly called itself the 
Societas Bardonmi Vatiumque Columbiae. 

Of college organizations whose purpose is primarily 
social, the most conspicuous, and on the whole the 
most typical, is the Greek letter fraternity. In the 
college secret societies for men there are, in round fig- 
ures, a total enrollment of three hundred thousand 
(more than four times the enrollment of thirty years 
ago), and an investment in lands, buildings, and en- 
dowment of more than twelve million dollars. 

The fifteen hundred living chapters are scattered 
through the colleges over the length and breadth of the 
United States and Canada. The only exceptions are 
the colleges of Mississippi, where they are forbidden 
by law, and Princeton, Oberliu, with one or two of our 
new colleges like Reed, and most of the Catholic and 
some few other denominational institutions. Besides 
the chapters there have developed alunmi associations, 
city clubs, an elaborate heraldry, catalogues, histories, 
magazines, and song books. 

Phi Beta Kappa was formed in 1776, but the clubs 



138 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

that really began our present system were founded at 
Union and Hamilton a half century later. Their rapid 
spread throughout the college world was due to an in- 
teresting combination of two influences. The college 
curriculum lacked literary subjects and opportunities 
for self-expression, and there was intense interest at 
the time in freemasonry and the like. With time the 
fraternities took on widely different functions and re- 
sponsibilities. First renting and later building their 
own houses, they took up the problem of the home life 
of the students, and to-day are perhaps more than 
anything else schools of social training. If any one 
thinks the value of this training in a fraternity is neg- 
ligible, let him pick out at random ten fraternity and 
ten non-fraternity men from any graduating class, 
and he will see a difference in social efficiency much 
greater than can be explained by the obvious retort 
that it is the gregarious type of boy that naturally 
goes into the fraternity. If it had not been for the 
development of club life, the fraternities might have 
entirely disappeared with the growth of athletic and 
other interests among the students. 

Each college chapter of the "line" fraternities bears 
a definite relation to the college administration, to the 
student body, to the other fraternities in the college, 
to its own alumni, to its national organization and 
sister chapters, to the whole fraternity world, and 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 139 

finally to the nation itself. In addition there are spe- 
cial developments at certain institutions, the senior 
societies at Yale, the Harvard clubs, and the local 
societies here and there. 

In all this complexity the important thing is always 
the relation of some particular boy to some particular 
society. If the freshman when he gets to college has 
had a father, an elder brother, or a chum to pave the 
way, or if he brings an athletic reputation or even if he 
is comparatively unknown but has enjoyed the ironing 
out process of a boarding school, or has acquired else- 
where the necessary tricks of dress and manner, he 
is "rushed" by one or more societies — a very com- 
plicated and in many ways an absurd performance. 
Under the pretense of entertainment he is filled with 
information calculated to show the overwhelming su- 
periority of the society in question to all others, and 
the critical importance to himself of accepting an invi- 
tation to join. 

It is impossible, of course, to guarantee the result of 
acquiescence in any individual case. Any boy may be 
harmed by membership in any society, but if he has 
chosen a good college in the first place and taken the 
trouble to learn something about the fraternities repre- 
sented there, and which of them is likely to be best for 
him, he will be benefited in numberless ways. 
^ These clubs have their ups and downs, and pleasant 



HO THE UNDERGRADUATE 

as it is to be a member of an organization of long 
historic tradition, intimate association during one's 
undergraduate days with the best group of students 
available is really more important. The chances are 
that a younger society will get the prestige later on, if 
it is now getting the best boys in open competition. 
The main thing for a freshman to consider is whether 
the young men whom he meets appeal to him as 
prospective intimate friends, and are likely to bring 
out the best that is in him. 

In general the old and socially prominent organiza- 
tions are losing their lead over the younger and less 
well known fraternities, as the result of complacency 
and laziness. They are also likely to suffer from in- 
breeding. I recently visited a chapter where eighteen 
of the twenty-four members are the sons or younger 
brothers of former members. The newer societies have 
few "legacies" and consequently have a freer hand in 
their selections. They are willing to take a chance with 
boys overlooked at first. They have usually developed 
a more effective central organization. For example, 
some of them keep the boys* parents informed as to 
the member's standing in scholarship and imder- 
graduate activities throughout his course. Some few 
of the older societies, it should be said, early saw the 
wisdom of such policies, one of the oldest being the 
first to appoint a paid traveling secretary. 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 141 

The undergraduate chapter, except for occasional 
visits from alumni, is all in all in a separate 'college. 
In a university, on the other hand, there are always 
graduates from other chapters more or less closely 
affiliated, and while chapter life is likely to be less in- 
timate, since more of the members live outside the 
chapter house, it usually represents a wider, social, 
geographical, and intellectual horizon. 

The relative educational value of the life in different 
chapters, even in the same fraternity, varies widely; 
conversation may be Umited to trivial athletic details, 
or girls, or clumsy local joking; or it may show that 
the men are not afraid to be interested in intellectual 
matters or public affairs. 

Let me give an example or two of chapter spirit at 
its best. At a country chapter house the boys set apart 
enough of their scanty spending money to keep a 
brother with tuberculosis at Saranac for two years. 
And at least one city chapter, as an organization, 
makes itself responsible for work at a down- town settle- 
ment. At McGill and the University of Toronto the 
chapters have been virtually wiped out by the unanim- 
ity with which the members enrolled for service at the 
outbreak of the great war, and the same process has 
already begun at many a society on our own side of 
the line. 

The standing in scholarship of any chapter always 



142 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

bears a very close relation to its finances, its sobri- 
ety, and its morals, which is a fact worth while for 
parents and mature-minded undergraduates to re- 
member. The scholarship lists are usually published 
nowadays, and information may always be had from 
the college. If any chapter appears consistently at or 
near the bottom of the list, or if the members have a 
bad reputation among the local tradesmen, it is almost 
certain that a closer inspection will reveal drinking, 
gambling, or other imdesirable activities. An untidy 
house usually indicates slovenly administration and a 
lack of pride in the society. 

Where the non-fraternity students are numerous 
enough to be significant, the general scholarship aver- 
age of the fraternity students is still distinctly lower 
than that of the former, but thanks to vigorous efforts, 
the fraternity men are now advancing somewhat more 
rapidly than any other group in the community. 
The percentage of them who leave college without 
graduating is twenty-nine per cent, which is to-day 
slightly less than that of college men as a whole. 

In considering the fraternity as a college phenome- 
non we must not forget the boy who is not invited to 
join. The activities of the fraternity chapters, their 
''rushing," their dances, their dabbling in college 
politics, is regarded by the complete outsider as a 
peculiarly offensive combination of snobbery, frivolity, 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 143 

and corruption, and he rather rejoices at being recog- 
nized as a different order of being. A boy in what 
Arthur Train calls the "gray zone," however, is likely 
to suffer acutely from the thought that he has been 
sized up by all the groups and not considered as good 
enough for even the poorest of them, and if a boy has 
set his heart on some particular club and is overlooked 
by it, other invitations give him scant pleasure. Many 
such students in colleges where the fraternity tradi- 
tion is most potent, leave at the end of their freshman 
year for some university where the conventional fra- 
ternity machinery is less in evidence. 

It would be a pious deed, if it were possible, to 
abolish some chapters in every college, and even every 
chapter in some colleges, but until we find a better 
vehicle for a certain kind of training that boys need, 
I am inclined to think, though many of my academic 
friends would disagree, we had better stick to the 
machinery that has grown up spontaneously. Man 
is a gregarious animal, and his impulse to form groups 
is based on a deep-seated instinct. 

As I have said earlier in this book, the fraternities 
deserve their full share of blame for the wave of general 
irresponsibility and laxness of about twenty years ago, 
but much of the intemperate charges now leveled at 
them is based upon conditions that, except in rare 
instances, no longer exist. 



144 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The element of secrecy is soon accepted by most 
members at its real value. They realize that, as a 
matter of fact, fraternity secrets are almost non- 
existent. Secrecy is not the main reason for the lack 
of democracy in many fraternities. Delta Upsilon, a 
non-secret society, is Httle better than its rivals in this 
matter, and at Princeton, where secret societies are 
forbidden, but where there is the same spontaneous 
grouping of young men as at other institutions, we 
recently witnessed a protest against these non-secret 
clubs on the very grounds of exclusiveness and lack of 
democracy so familiar to all students of the fraternities. 

In my judgment the fraternities are on the whole 
moving in the right direction. Better standards in the 
good colleges mean that fewer idle-minded boys are 
ehgible for election, or if elected, the harm they are 
sure to do to the fraternity group is much briefer in 
its duration. 

Inmost institutions the fraternities are under faculty 
control to the extent that eligibility for initiation means 
passing in a majority of first-term subjects. Further- 
more, the dean usually has good friends in each senior 
"delegation," whom he consults as to the scholarship 
and general welfare of the imder-classmen. The stu- 
dent council often limits, to the benefit of the chapters, 
the number of house parties and dances to be held in a 
season. The alumni of each chapter have a very defi- 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 145 

nite influence in chapter affairs, which also is usually 
exerted for good. They take legitimate advantage of 
the fact that the money for the chapter house has 
come from them, and that in most cases they hold 
title to the property. 

The millennium, however, is still a long way off. 
Although scholarship has been greatly improved by 
cutting off at the bottom, the fraternities as yet do 
little to stimulate the really talented men. Many a 
boy of brilliant scholarly promise is so overloaded with 
minor duties ''round the house," or pressed into out- 
side activities to enhance the chapter reputation, that 
he has to content himself with a barely respectable 
passing mark. 

The fraternities, particularly the older ones, seem 
to me also to be too cautious. In selecting their new 
members they lay so much stress on what is supposed 
to be social position that they are afraid to take 
chances, and as a result are likely to get a majority of 
rather negative-minded boys, and this results in what 
seems to me to be the most important danger — a 
narrowing of social horizon and of human charity. 
Their general reputation suffers severely from the arro- 
gance and stupidity of the least enlightened members. 
The withdrawal from the New York City College of a 
well-known fraternity was deemed of sufficient impor- 
tance for widespread editorial discussion, and the 



146 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

right of a State to abolish secret societies in its public 
institutions was carried up to the Supreme Court and 
there sustained in 19 15. 

There are examples enough of snobbery, inconsider- 
ateness, and selfish stupidity, but at least the begin- 
nings of a new spirit of individual responsibility for 
social justice and tolerance may be recognized. The 
question as to whether a man is his brother's keeper, 
moreover, is not limited to the radicals and iconoclasts 
in any good college, but is being honestly faced by a 
growing number of serious-minded boys who do not 
believe that whatever is is wrong, and who are willing 
to do their share in improving the social and political 
institutions that they find to their hand. In the best 
fraternities such men are doing much to break down 
the silly conventionaHsm and injustices that furnish 
the basis for criticism of fraternity Ufe to-day, and 
every November about a hundred alumni, many of 
them distinguished in various walks of life, meet in an 
Inter-Fraternity Conference, in New York, and give 
serious consideration to plans for checking the evils 
and emphasizing the good qualities of the American 
fraternities — a significant tribute to the weight of 
opinion in favor of the fraternity as a college institution. 

Turning now to the political machinery, it should 
first be noted that the changes within recent years 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 147 

have been very rapid. In the good old days the class 
was the primary unit of organization, and the interest 
in class politics often reached a pitch of intensity which 
colored the entire after lives of the participants. Now- 
adays with the development of the elective system, 
and the social and athletic groupings which cut across 
class lines, the class bond is relatively less strong. The 
freshmen, nevertheless, are promptly gathered to- 
gether by the junior president, and they proceed to 
elect their own officers, and to frame a constitu- 
tion designed to provide for every conceivable and 
inconceivable contingency. Thereafter, meetings of 
decreasing frequency are held, at which zealous 
youngsters make fervent and lengthy speeches upon 
matters of slight importance. The sophomores keep 
up the organization largely for the purpose of see- 
ing that the freshmen are properly received into the 
community, after which class meetings are likely to 
languish until Class Day and graduation. Formerly 
the classes were expected to provide opportunities for 
social joys. Now that the fraternities are no longer 
lodges, but clubs, with all too frequent house parties 
and chapter dances, and astute managers are arranging 
dances to stimulate attendance at basket-ball games 
and concerts, there is really Uttle left for the class to do 
in this field except to arrange for a hectic Junior Week, 
and for the social side of its commencement activities. 



148 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The whole question of the relation of the college to 
the eternal feminine has changed as much as anything 
else in the evolutionary processes of the institution. 
Even in my own day, although undergraduates were 
known to have girl friends and from time to time to see 
them, their college life was kept very distinctly apart 
from their feminine interests, except on certain clearly 
marked occasions; as, for example, the Junior Ball or 
on Class Day. To-day girls play a very prominent 
part in college Hf e, personally I think a far too promi- 
nent part at many institutions; and one of the ques- 
tions which a thoughtful parent should ask about the 
college he is considering for his son is whether its life 
contains too many of the elements of the summer hotel. 
The matter is largely one of local tradition and de- 
velopment and depends surprisingly little upon the 
statutory organization of the institution. There are 
coeducational colleges where the boys and girls really 
have very little to do with one another, and so-called 
'^monastic" colleges where the students are incessantly 
importing girls from near-by and even distant towns 
for dances and parties of all kinds. 

But I have wandered from my subject, which the 
reader may recall is the student as a poKtical animal. 
The most interesting and important development of 
recent years is the growing responsibility of a body of 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 149 

seniors, elected by the student body at large and 
usually called the *' Senior Council," though it some- 
times has a classical appellation, as at Dartmouth, 
where it is known as the ''Palaeopitus.'^ At most in- 
stitutions to-day the senior council has powers and 
responsibilities which would have been simply un- 
thinkable to professors or students half a century ago. 
The colleges which refuse to throw such responsibilities 
on the students are severely criticized even by their 
own members. For example, George Ade recently re- 
signed as a trustee of such an institution, his reason 
being that he was "still of the opinion that you cannot 
teach a bird to fly by tying him to a limb." 

One important matter in which the student coimcil 
often succeeds where the college administration has 
failed is in the control and oversight of the local repre- 
sentatives of the daily press, whose ill-considered activ- 
ities have often done a college serious injustice. This 
may be because the student body represents a large 
number of potential purchasers of any journal, whereas 
the college administration does not, but at any rate the 
results are most satisfactory. Some of the other activ- 
ities of the council are very interesting. For example, 
at Princeton lectures are being arranged by profes- 
sional men representative of different callings, so that 
the students may have some idea of the relative merits 
of the occupations which they may enter after gradua- 



ISO THE UNDERGRADUATE 

tion. Of course the council sometimes bites off more 
than it can profitably chew, but this also happens to 
governmental heads upon much older shoulders. For 
example, the Harvard council was unable to force com- 
pulsory membership in the Harvard Union, desirable 
as that arrangement would have been to the finance 
committee of the Union. In dealing with matters of 
discipline, which are being more and more referred to 
the council by the college faculty, they sometimes err 
on the side of over-severity, but usually they have an 
instinct for making the punishment fit the crime, which 
was often lacking sadly under the older regime. A 
fellow-dean and I once referred a rather serious case to 
the Columbia Student Council. A horde of triumphant 
sophomores had paraded at a late hour through one 
of the girls' dormitories of the university. Though the 
boys meant no harm, they had certainly committed a 
grave indiscretion and had brought a deal of tmpleas- 
ant newspaper notoriety upon their alma mater. The 
senior council reaHzed the gravity of the situation, but 
before they agreed to take it up they very properly 
asked what would be the exact status of their findings. 
One of the boys, I remember, put it as follows: *' Sup- 
posing we go into this thing thoroughly, and supposing 
I, for example, vote for the punishment of some very 
intimate friend, a fellow in my own fraternity, and 
then supposing the college does n't do anything — 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 151 

where does that leave me?" It was an embarrassing 
question, to which my colleague and I finally replied 
that, while naturally we could not commit the president 
or the trustees, he and I would agree to recommend 
publicly that the findings of the council be approved, 
so that if they were overruled we should be overruled 
with them. This seemed satisfactory, and the boys 
went into the ajffair very carefully and fixed upon the 
ingenious punishment for the entire class of prohibiting 
the holding of the historic Junior Ball. It was a severe 
punishment to the class, but it bore upon all equally 
and it was supported by student public opinion. That 
was several years ago, and we certainly have had not 
the slightest sign of a recurrence of the difficulty. 

The experience which the members themselves get 
from the senior coimcil is of the greatest value. The 
high average of efficiency is all the more surprising 
when we remember that election is too often due to a 
successful athletic career or some other largely irrele- 
vant factor. At some colleges an interesting system of 
multiple or preferential voting is being tried out, to 
discourage "deals," and to keep the successful candi- 
dates from being limited to a small group of the pro- 
fessionally prominent men. Once elected, the mem- 
bers are likely to lose a good deal of their popularity, 
because in their activities they necessarily tread upon 
many toes, but the fact that the students as a body 



152 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

are in a position, through their own representatives, to 
change unsatisfactory conditions has done much to 
eradicate the old habit of idle "knocking." 

The most widely discussed instance of the taking 
over of responsibilities by the students in matters 
formerly exclusively in the hands of the faculty is the 
so-called "honor system" of examinations. This is 
really a misnomer. The point is the transfer of the 
responsibility for honorable conduct from the faculty 
to the students, but the name is not really important 
after all. Mr, Lester, of the Hill School, recently gath- 
ered some interesting statistics, based upon three 
hundred and fifty letters of inquiry to colleges and two 
hundred and eighty replies thereto. At present he 
finds about thirty per cent of the colleges have systems 
which have superseded faculty supervision of exami- 
nations more or less completely. He gives no figures 
as to colleges where the matter is still under active dis- 
cussion, but to any one who reads the educational items 
in the newspapers it is evident that the matter is "up " 
at many additional institutions. Sixty per cent of the 
colleges now having such a system are for men; forty- 
four per cent of them are in the South, which is natural, 
because the honor system was originally established 
in 1842 at the University of Virginia, which still holds 
a position of hegemony throughout the whole region. 
Of the institutions having the system, about one third 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 153 

require a definite promise from a student to report dis- 
honesty on the part of a fellow-student. 

So far as my own experience goes, the system suc- 
ceeds when the student body is homogeneous, as at 
Virginia, Princeton, or Williams. In institutions of 
this type sending to Coventry really means something, 
and the danger of it may be expected to act as a deter- 
rent. Such conditions are to be found only in a com- 
paratively small nimiber of the more important col- 
leges, but this does not mean that the system should 
not ultimately prove to be the best for all institutions. 
It does mean, however, that it should be adopted at 
places not having this natural advantage, not as a mat- 
ter of collegiate imitation, as has sometimes, I fear, 
been the case, but only after thorough study and a 
demonstration of the presence in the institution of a 
social conscience and a sense of social responsibiKty. 
In matters of this kind a convention, even if nothing 
higher, of honor is absolutely essential. Such a con- 
vention, by the way, exists in the Enghsh and Scotch 
imiversities in spite of very close faculty supervision 
of examinations. This point of view is developing rap- 
idly in the United States as a result of improved rela- 
tions between faculty and students, and I expect to see 
the honor system the normal thing before many years, 
but in the meantime I believe more harm than good 
is done by its premature establishment. 



154 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Other examples of the turning over of important 
responsibilities to students is in the self-government 
system of many college dormitories and in the designa- 
tion, preferably by the senior council, of older students 
to act as informal advisers to freshmen. Senior advisers 
are now appointed at Harvard, Michigan, Minnesota, 
and elsewhere. At the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology the system is very carefully developed. The 
candidate for admission receives a letter during the 
summer from a boy of whom he has probably never 
heard, duly authenticated by a confirming letter from 
the dean, telling him when and where to report upon 
his arrival at Cambridge. The adviser, who usually 
has four freshmen in his charge, takes a real personal 
interest in them. He sees that they successfully master 
the intricacies of registration, helps them choose a 
room, and advises them about various undergraduate 
societies and other activities. 

We are trying at Columbia an interesting experi- 
ment in the way of an informal organization to em-^ 
phasize the spirit of cooperation between the students 
and the faculty. At the meetings of our College 
Forum, which are called only when there is something 
worth while to discuss, officers and students meet on 
a plane of absolute equality and discuss matters of 
educational or social importance with the utmost 



STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS 155 

frankness. We are in hopes that the Forum will prove 
an important factor in the life of the college, not merely 
as a place for frank interchange of views, but as a 
means of making the student body at large appreciate 
at his true worth the man who has an idea, who gets up 
and expresses it clearly and forcibly, and who then sits 
down. One reason why the athlete's reward in public 
appreciation is so great is that he has an obvious way 
of showing the quality of his performance to the stu- 
dent body, and where the thinker and speaker is given 
the same opportunity — he has it, for instance, in the 
Union at Oxford or Cambridge — he will get the same 
recognition from his fellow-students. 

Is the game of college life, of which I have been 
giving only the most incomplete suggestion of the 
complicated rules, worth the candle ? On the whole, I 
think it is. I do not mean that it was necessarily worth 
while as played by the individual boy under the con- 
ditions immediately preceding the war, particularly by 
the boy who overlooked the fact that there are only 
twenty-four hours in each day. We must find better 
means to check the tendency of overloading am- 
bitious men. In many places the senior council is 
working on this problem and with some degree of 
success. A second problem is to find the proper com- 
bination of spontaneity and efficiency. This depends 
upon just the right amount of participation by the 



156 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

faculty in student affairs. These problems are difficult, 
but not insoluble, and with the simplification of stu- 
dent life which I am confident will come as a by- 
product of the war, it is my belief that they will be 
solved. 



CHAPTER VI 
ATHLETICS 

The fact that I am devoting a separate chapter to 
athletics alone among the myriad student activities is 
significant of the place which they occupy in the minds, 
not only of the students, but of all who talk or write 
about colleges to-day. This interest, which all too 
often amounts to an obsession in the case of intercol- 
legiate contests, is of surprisingly recent growth, but 
that growth has been so rapid and so widespread that 
it deserves serious study both by the friends and the 
enemies of athletics. When we read of the way in 
which so clear-headed a people as the ancient Greeks 
went mad over the Olympic games, we realize that the 
interest in athletic contests must be based upon a fun- 
damental human instinct, and that attempts to guide 
it will prove much more profitable than attempts to 
check or stamp it out. Under the irritation of the evils 
which accompany athletics we are prone to overlook 
the really good points. 

That men are no longer either blind to the accom- 
panying evils or silent in their presence is evident from 
many recent publications, of which the most conspicu- 
ous is an article in the *' Atlantic" in which President 



iS8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Foster states that his impression is that at least three 
fourths of the teachers he has met the country over be- 
lieve that the American college would better serve its 
highest purposes if intercollegiate athletics were no 
more; and he closes his article with the following para- 
graph:— 

Typically American though our frantic devotion to inter- 
collegiate athletics may be, we shall not long tolerate a sys- 
tem which provides only a costly, injurious, and excessive 
regime of physical training for a few students, especially 
those who need it least. The call to-day is for inexpensive, 
healthful, and moderate exercise for all students, especially 
those who need it most. Colleges must sooner or later heed 
that call; their athletics must be for education, not for busi- 
ness. 

At the last meeting of the National Collegiate Ath- 
letic Association it was proposed that the executive 
committee request one of the great educational funds, 
the Carnegie, the Sage, or the Rockefeller, to make an 
impartial and searching survey of the condition of ath- 
letics in American colleges "with particular reference 
to their moral influence." ^ 

As a matter of fact, in spite of such symptoms as the 
monumental stadia and other evidences of over-em- 
phasis, a reaction has already set in. Not long ago I 
was at a men's dinner when President Foster's article 
was discussed. There were fourteen of us, all college 
men, in different professions, and all fond of athletics. 



ATHLETICS 159 

It developed that ten out of the fourteen were in favor 
of the abolition of intercollegiate athletics until the 
present hysteria should have subsided, and the other 
four favored radically reduced schedules and simplifi- 
cation of administration. One of the results of the out- 
break of the Great War was the immediate and almost 
complete cancelling of intercollegiate athletic contests. 
This was, of course, a real sacrifice on the part of the 
students, but it did not involve, I think, so violent a 
wrench as would have been the case a few years ago. 
Later on, when we have time to think these things 
over, this experience may help us in the reestablish- 
ment of these contests upon a more reasonable basis. 

Mr. Lawrence Perry, who is a keen student of ath- 
letic conditions, writes: — 

Present indications are that, when athletics are again 
resumed, they will be conducted upon a saner, more reason- 
able, more economic basis, at least in institutions whose au- 
thorities in the present interregnum are sufficiently clear- 
sighted to grasp the trend which extra-curricular affairs 
have been taking in the past few years. Those who are 
aware of the attitude of athletes graduating from second- 
ary schools with reference to the selection of institutions 
of higher learning; who know of the competition among 
alumni of these institutions for the services of these school 
stars; who are cognizant of the system under which highly 
paid coaches work — those, in brief, who have marked, not 
without amazement, or trepidation, or both, increasing 
manifestations of topheavy growth of our athletic system, 
will appreciate the opportunities which the present break 



i6o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

presents to those whose sense of proportion and ideals have 
not been warped through association more or less close 
with university sports. 

Intercollegiate athletics — and no one hears any 
criticism of intramural athletics, except when the base- 
ball breaks a window — began in the decade after the 
Civil War, with the sports of rowing, — the first to 
come into general popularity, — baseball, and foot- 
ball; and these, with track athletics, which developed 
soon after, are still regarded as the four major sports. 
To them have been added a dozen or more others. It 
is not necessary to try to draw too sharp a line. Walk- 
ing and canoeing may be genuine enough athletics, but 
what we are talking about is, of course, what street 
*boys (and too many college boys) call "atheletics," 
and includes not only the performers and their per- 
formances, but the whole cult that has grown up about 
the contests, and the elaborate conventionality with 
which the proceedings are conducted. 

The best friends of reform in athletics are those who 
do not shut their eyes to the actual facts. Dr. Ray- 
croft, of Princeton, for example, writes: — 

It must be recognized as a biological fact that the adoles- 
cent animal of any species naturally holds in higher esteem 
honors which represent preeminence in physical achieve- 
ments, plus brains, than he does purely intellectual attain- 
ment, which is instinctively regarded as of secondary im- 
portance during this period of rapid bodily growth and 
development. 



ATHLETICS i6i 

Nor must it be forgotten that many a man can 
point honestly to the training he received in college 
sports as a very important part of his intellectual and 
moral, as well as of his physical, education. 

The danger of injury has been greatly reduced, even 
in the rougher games, by more rigid medical oversight, 
and in some cases by changes in the rules, and there is 
now no doubt that the injuries, serious as they are 
sometimes, are more than counterbalanced by the gen- 
eral physical improvement in the student body. This 
is a matter of closer interest to an educational institu- 
tion than is sometimes realized, because the correla- 
tion between good health and good scholarship is a 
definitely positive one. A study of the mortality sta- 
tistics of a group of students of school and college age 
recently made at a state university has shown in a 
striking way that the deaths among young people of 
this age are predominantly from the lowest group in 
scholarship rank. Nor is there any question as to the 
value of the lessons taught in team work and loyalty. 

The trouble is, not that the lessons to be learned 
from athletics are not in themselves good, but that 
they are imperfectly, or rather lopsidedly, learned. 
The boy hears so much about his service to the college 
that he begins to look upon himself as a contributor, 
and as conferring a favor instead of enjoying a privi- 



1 62 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

lege. Toward other colleges generous rivalry too often 
degenerates into dislike and suspicion. One of the 
recommendations of the recent olEcial State Educa- 
tional Survey of Iowa was the discontinuance of the 
annual football game between two of the State institu- 
tions, because of the bitterness which it had engen- 
dered. Team play ought to break down selfishness if 
anything can, but boys often do not see the wider im- 
plications. Many athletes blandly expect academic 
privileges per se. Boys stop at the development of 
physical courage in too many cases. There are exam- 
ples of whining and pettifogging about grades and even 
of actual dishonesty and graft. Even making proper 
allowance for the fact that every college man who gets 
into the newspapers is a famous athlete, by definition, 
we find in the divorce courts too many names which 
we recognize as those of athletes. 

The essential factor is, of course, that the boys are 
no longer playing the games for themselves or even for 
their colleges. They are part of a great highty organ- 
ized amusement enterprise, like horse-racing, with its 
public, its press, and its profits. The interest of many 
an alujnnus in the team of his college is really no more 
academic than is that of the Chicago man in the 
*Xubs,'* and many a father holds forth upon his son*s 
performances at college exactly as he would upon those 
of a promising three-year-old in his stable. It is this 



ATHLETICS 163 

externality of the whole business which has made over- 
developed athletics so much of what President Butler 
appropriately calls *'an academic nuisance.'* It is not 
a cooperating, but a splitting, factor between students 
and faculty, and it has done more than anything else 
to delay the coming of the new spirit of working to- 
gether and thinking together; and, indeed, in some in- 
stances it has involved a turning back to the attitude 
of forty years ago on both sides. For the students 
themselves the games are no longer the natural outlets 
of youthful exuberance. Very few men play football 
for pleasure. Even under the new rules they play it for 
the prominence to be gained or as their contribution to 
the renown of the college. I remember the naive com- 
ment of a 'Varsity oarsman on the wisdom of keeping 
another member of the squad in the first boat: ''He 
may have his faults, but don't forget that he is the only 
one of us who really likes to row." Baseball is the only 
one of the major sports which the players seem to en- 
joy unanimously and which they would play just as 
hard without the publicity elements which we have 
introduced into all our athletic contests. The reason 
that many ball-players slip into siunmer professional- 
ism is, I think, not inherent depravity, but because 
they need the money to meet college expenses, and this 
method of getting it is not only pleasant, but adds to 
their eflSciency as contributors to the prestige of the 



i64 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

college. This reasoning is not very straight, but it is 
understandable. The unmoral attitude which many 
boys, whom I know to be honest about other matters, 
adopt toward such things as beating the throw-in is 
discouraging, but while we regard winning as ninety 
per cent of the game, it also is understandable. 

The bad eminence of football in all these matters is 
partly accidental. It provides copy for the press and 
pageantry for the public, at a very convenient season, 
between professional baseball and pugilism. There is 
no denying that it is pleasant to have an excuse to de- 
sert one's desk and spend an afternoon out of doors 
before wiater actually closes down. I venture to guess 
that the development of professional football — there 
is no reason why it should not develop here as it has in 
England, it has indeed already had its beginning in 
Ohio and Minnesota — would do much to clear the 
air so far as the colleges are concerned. But we must 
not wholly condemn the public and the press, because 
it was the protests of the former that led to the elim- 
ination of much of the brutality of the game, and the 
best sporting editors are now strongly supporting the 
new code of ethics in football. 

The alumni are more responsible than any single fac- 
tor for football evils, but the colleges should take some 
blame for not training these men better when they 



ATHLETICS 165 

had them under their influence. It must be remem- 
bered that the alumni who to-day set the standard 
of conventional public opinion were undergraduates 
during that period of interregnum when the faculty 
had lost control and had not begun to develop co- 
operation. When the boys now in the senior councils, 
who are learning to share the responsibilities for the 
good name of the institution in an intelligent way, 
become the representative alumni, I am sure we may 
hope for better influences. 

The athlete's father is often an alumnus, and is 
always influenced by the standards of the general pub- 
lic. The average father would much rather have the 
chance to mention casually to his friends his son's elec- 
tion to the football captaincy than the boy's winning 
academic distinction, and often he does not hesitate 
to let the boy know it. I know one father, at least, 
whose only interest in his son's term reports is that he 
can judge from them whether the latter is still eligible 
for athletics. 

The most serious element of all is the professional 
coach, usually paid for by alumni or out of the profits 
of the game, and often paid as much as the president 
himself. The coach is not always a bad influence on 
the boys, particularly if he is not of the itinerant va- 
riety, but when his influence is good he should be tied 
into the faculty, and not left outside as a free lance. 



1 66 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Faculties are often to blame for not giving men of this 
kind academic recognition, just because they don't 
happen to be college graduates. They may not have 
degrees, but they know their subject quite as well as 
their fellow-teachers, and, frankly, are likely to possess 
a stronger supply of personality and leadership. 

What does the student himself think about athletics? 
Often he does not think at all. He may not be so im- 
personal as the Shah of Persia who refused to go to the 
Derby on the ground that **it is already known to me 
that one horse can run faster than another," but in the 
university colleges there is a large mass of men who are 
utterly indifferent, and there are more of them than is 
generally^ realized in the smaller institutions. When 
the student does think, his efforts are very much con- 
fused, and sometimes may be called "thinking," only 
by courtesy. Boys who come from athleticized prepar- 
atory schools bring with them a complete supply of 
athletic lore, and others of the imitative type pick it 
up from them and from older students. The attitude of 
their fellows toward boys who are bought and paid 
for is sometimes one of cynical acceptance of the inevi- 
table, but more often it is a convenient ignoring of the 
obvious. Undergraduate athletic opinion is riddled 
with convention. Take, for example, the almost uni- 
versal belief that one must continue to play a discredit- 



ATHLETICS 167 

able rival until he is beaten. Then, and then only, 
may relations be broken. 

It is only the very exceptional undergraduate who 
does not firmly believe in the good influence of athlet- 
ics. They are regarded — that is, successful athletics 
are regarded — as the only means of making the in- 
stitution grow. Student opinion on this point is often 
shared by trustees, presidents, and even by professors, 
but in view of the statistics gathered by President 
Eliot and others, it is evident that the influence in this 
direction is very greatly over-estimated. What turns 
a boy toward a particular college is its all-round life, 
including the athletics, not athletics alone; and al- 
though a dual code of honor is still too prevalent, never- 
theless boys are coming to a realization of what a good 
athletic reputation means, and they are unwilling to 
go to a college where conditions are so notorious that 
they will have to bear the pleasantries of their friends 
on the subject. 

Fifty years ago the boy's sports and pastimes were 
sublimely ignored by the faculty, and the first serious 
attempts to control them were taken up unwillingly 
and only in the face of scandal. At first popular pro- 
fessors were selected for the task, often men unsuited 
by training and temperament, and lacking the highly 
necessary knowledge of human nature. Many of them 



1 68 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

were spineless. Many others were careless, and often 
left all the details to some clerk, who might be 
'^reached." Not a few professors themselves were cor- 
rupted, as also have been other college officers not 
directly connected with the administration of athletics. 
I know of at least one college president who admits 
privately that the make-up of the football team is a 
source of great distress to him, but that he dare not in- 
terfere because by doing so he would lose the support in 
educational matters of certain powerful trustees and 
other alumni. Athletic "scholarships," so-called, are 
usually looked after by the athletic lobby, but some- 
times college funds are corruptly used for this pur- 
pose. 

Boards of trustees are not wholly without blame. 
They have often accepted, and even solicited, gifts for 
athletics out of all proportion to the intellectual needs 
and equipment of the institution. What is the student 
to think of the relative value of things when he finds 
an immense stadium or a marble-lined swimming-pool 
on the one side, and ill-planned, ill-lighted, and ill- ven- 
tilated classrooms on the other? 

Some professors, having lived through the period of 
storm and stress, are now experts, and exert great in- 
fluence for good, not only in their own institutions, but 
throughout the college world at large. I have in mind 
such men as Dean Briggs, of Harvard, Professor Cor- 



ATHLETICS 169 

win, of Yale, and others. Let me quote a few sen- 
tences from a recent address by the former: — 

The time when boys at college, after playing with each 
other for pure fun, played for pure fun with boys from other 
colleges is about as likely to come again as the Golden Age, 
which it is believed to have resembled. Nowadays, even 
little children are not suffered to play without direction, 
and the forcing of the play into some educational system. 
In the highly developed sports of college students, there 
must be some steady, controlling power such as cannot 
be demanded of amateur graduates, who presumably 
have to earn their living and cannot devote their time 
to the gratuitous coaching of college teams. With no- 
table exceptions, amateur coaches are inconstant and 
transient, tempted to graft, unable, for want of time and 
of tenure, to carry out a well-considered policy. There 
are still some of us who may take a lesson from those of you 
who put athletic sport where it belongs, recognizing the 
men who have charge of it as educators in spite of them- 
selves, determining that no man shall have charge of it who 
is not fit to be an educator, and choosing men of sound 
knowledge whom they are not ashamed to make professors 
in their faculty. Such men are professionals, as every sal- 
aried officer of the college is a professional, and in no other 
way. Despite the principle of supply and demand, there 
may be reasons why the athletic coach should not receive 
three times as much salary as the professor of Greek; but 
there is no inherent reason why he should not hold a posi- 
tion of equal dignity. He can do more good than the pro- 
fessor of Greek, and a great deal more harm. Thus faculty 
control in athletics should be like faculty control in Greek, 
or economics, or chemistry — not intervention in details, 
but that power of adjustment in common interests which 



I70 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

may fitly be exercised over a department of physical edu- 
cation — a department composed, like other departments, 
of experts or of persons engaged as such. Faculty con- 
trol, then, in the best sense, means taking the coaches 
into the faculty team. It means, also, choosing coaches 
who are not out of place therein. There is no more reason 
why the teacher of football should curse his pupils than 
why the teacher of Greek should curse his, who may be 
quite as exasperating; and there is every reason why the 
leader whose manners and conduct are more catching than 
any others should lead straight, whether on or off the 
field. 

The tendency to-day is fortunately strongly toward 
thus turning over the responsibility for athletics to the 
academic departments of physical education, where, of 
course, it obviously belongs. The absurdly high salaries 
of professional coaches is due largely to the fact that 
the coach is paid from "easy money,'' namely, gate 
receipts, which is as appropriate as would be the pay- 
ment of the president of the institution in proportion 
to the gifts he secures. The amateur coach has, as 
Dean Briggs says, been tried and found wanting. The 
physical education departments have in general taken 
up their responsibility in an admirably intelligent way, 
and it is a striking sign of the times that the under- 
graduate students at Hamilton, observing the results 
at sister institutions, have themselves petitioned their 
trustees to take that step. 



ATHLETICS 171 

There has been far too much faculty legislation about 
athletics and too much of it has been enacted in the old 
spirit of suspicion toward students. Vain attempts to 
legislate against poor ethical standards have been 
made, without the courage to remove the crying cause 
of these low standards, the itinerant coach. Faculties 
have too often reversed their decisions because of stu- 
dent and alumni outcry. There was a notorious case 
last year as to the removal of a football coach. Much 
of the faculty legislation — and this is also true of the 
operations of the various intercollegiate rules com- 
mittees — has been far too complicated. The essential 
difficulty in games involving physical contact, like foot- 
ball and hockey, is that these games came down to us 
from the past, essentially as imitations of warfare, and 
just now we are only too vividly reminded of how 
deeply rooted is the feeling that all is fair in war. 

In spite of their failures, the legislative reformers 
have done some good things. The tendency toward 
shorter schedules, and particularly fewer games away 
from home, is good, and the one-year attendance rule 
has broken up the practice of bidding men from one 
college to another. But we have still to overcome the 
evils of bribing boys of athletic promise before they 
leave the preparatory school. The bribes are not al- 
ways in money. The assurance of membership in a 
coveted club is even more effective. The head masters 



172 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of some of the important boarding schools are fortu- 
nately interesting themselves in this question from 
the point of view of the school and its life. 

Indirectly the colleges have improved athletics by 
improving the standards for admission and promotion. 
In the good colleges, at any rate, the type referred to 
by Mr. Seymour Deming as mens nulla in cor pore sano 
is rare if not extinct. There remains, however, the 
tendency here, as in other fields, to let men off with 
their second-best intellectual performance. Acting on 
the fallacy that the standard should be the same for all 
students, faculties stand helpless before the student of 
intellectual promise who spends far too much time in 
athletics, provided he secures a passing grade in his 
subjects. " ^ 

The most crying need of the moment is a more 
general participation in sports. President Garfield in 
a recent paper quoted figures to show that in the New 
England colleges the average expenditure per student 
for athletic purposes was one himdred and seventy 
dollars, with only sixteen per cent of the students 
participating in them. The figures for the country 
at large were correspondingly fifty-nine dollars and 
seventeen per cent participating. It will never be 
easy to prevent an overload upon particular students, 
because the lad who is good in one sport has a much 



ATHLETICS 173 

better chance than the average of being good in the 
others, and, furthermore, many boys can say with 
truth that they study better when training and com- 
peting. We must, however, find some way to keep our 
student hive from dividing sharply into the workers 
and the drones, with the *' Queen coach '^ at the apex of 
the system. 

I should like to see more development of indigenous 
sports, and also more activities bringing students and 
faculty together in outdoor life. The long walks of the 
German student clubs are among the pleasantest in- 
cidents of Continental student life. Other institutions 
here should follow the example of the Dartmouth 
Outing Club, which does both these things. Every 
winter a group of teachers and students climb Mount 
Washington on skis and creepers. During the Easter 
holidays the Walking Club of the University of Penn- 
sylvania sets another good example by a trip of three 
hundred miles or more. 

A more direct incentive to greater participation in 
athletics by the student body is found in the develop- 
ment of intramural sports. Some of these have sprung 
up spontaneously, as, for example, fraternity baseball 
games, and others have been inspired by the faculty 
or by the department of physical education. These 
games lack the evils that come from over-intensity 
and develop an excellent spirit of comradeship, and, 



174 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

finally, their development is based on common sense. 
You can't get students to improve their health by pull- 
ing chest weights. They want a game to play, and in 
most colleges the prescribed work required of freshmen 
to-day takes the form of some kind of contest. 

The institutions most successful in developing a 
general participation in athletics have naturally been 
the smaller colleges and those larger ones where the 
student body is so homogeneous as to be easily led. At 
Haverford, for example, one hundred and fifty out of 
the one himdred and eighty-six students take regular 
outdoor exercise; at Miami the percentage is said to be 
ninety-seven; and at Princeton it is estimated that two 
thirds of the student body are engaged in one or more 
sports in connection with intracollegiate teams. Still 
we have a long way to go before we can reach the con- 
ditions of Oxford and Cambridge before the present 
war. I once took a walk through the Oxford playing- 
fields on a raw afternoon in February, and as far as the 
eye could penetrate through the foggy atmosphere I 
saw games of football and terrestrial hockey, no one 
looking on except an umpire or two. Then I crossed 
the "High '' and, going down to the tow-path, I coimted 
thirteen college eights on the river, plus the 'Varsity. 
It is n't a question of climate. The Dartmouth winter 
sports have disproved that comfortable theory. It's a 
question of habit. What we need is to add to our 



ATHLETICS 175 

already plentiful supply of conventions that a man 
should keep fit, regardless of whether he is capable of 
breaking records or making teams. If I am not mis- 
taken the vigorous open-air life of the ofi&cers' training 
camps, for which thousands of our best undergraduates 
have deserted their colleges, will teach its lesson of the 
joys of being thoroughly in condition, and it may have 
a permanent effect on our undergraduate life. 

The striking development within recent years of the 
so-called ''minor sports'' not only leads to a more 
general participation, but has other merits as well. 
Hockey and basketball, which, indeed, have practically 
become major sports at many colleges, occupy the 
active students during the winter months and have had 
much to do with breaking up the sorry traditions of 
winter dissipation. Some of the minor sports like golf 
and tennis bring with them high standards of generous 
sportsmanship, which ought to have their influence on 
the more technically played games. The minor sports 
also are likely to be less conventionalized, though I 
was amused to see at a recent swimming-meet how 
every one of the candidates for the dive "walked the 
plank" with exactly the same affected gait. 

We have had difficulties in America from the very 
start with regard to amateurism, because we have 
copied the English standards and applied them to the 



176 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

widely different temperamental and social conditions 
over here. The home conditions of some boys, whose 
names are famous the country over as amateur colle- 
gians, would appall an Oxford man, but as a matter 
of fact many of these boys, trained as they have been 
in the excellent physical education departments of the 
public high schools, have really sounder ideals of 
sportsmanship than certain youths from the boarding 
schools. 

As a matter of fact, I never saw how a distinction 
based on money worked in England either, where 
grown boys will accept a tip of half a sovereign from 
family friends, and undergraduates are proverbially 
greedy about money prizes for scholarships. In this 
country, where so many of the students have to earn 
money in order to stay in college at all, it is hard to 
make them realize an ethical distinction between sell- 
ing books or kitchenware or playing summer baseball. 
Not a few close students of college athletics think that 
conditions would be greatly improved by wiping out 
entirely the present technical distinctions between 
amateur and professional conduct, and trusting to high 
academic standards, honestly administered, as the only 
criterion. Whether or not this policy will ever gain the 
day I do not know, but certainly we see at present a 
new emphasis on the spirit rather than the letter of the 
law. Dean Briggs has said: "Let our colleges keep at 



ATHLETICS 177 

the head of their athletics men who try to be honest. 
Let these men trust one another down to the ground, 
and half the evils of athletics will die a natural death." 
What we call ** professionalism" and try to define by so 
calling is really a point of view. As Professor Hall says, 
no rule can make a gentleman out of a mucker. The 
recent code of football ethics is a promising sign, and 
it is hoped that this may soon be followed by a similar 
code for baseball and basket ball. Colleges should real- 
ize that ethical responsibihties exist for institutions as 
well as for individuals and that those with high stand- 
ards should use the power which they possess for good 
by exercising their right to refuse to play games with 
colleges of poor standards. Definite action of this kind 
would certainly be better than the present alternative 
of casting stones at one's competitors or of adopting a 
''holier than thou'* attitude of implication that the 
standards of others are matters of supreme indiffer- 
ence to the Lord's anointed. In athletics to-day we are 
in the same position of intense nationalism in which 
the countries of the world find themselves, and we 
must hope that the future will bring in both instances 
a broader spirit. 

It would be silly to pretend that things do not need 
improvement in this field of undergraduate life, just 
because so much of the criticism is unfair. All the 



1 78 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

factors in the college organism have their place in 
bringing about a better state of affairs. The students 
themselves must realize the seriousness of the attacks 
on athleticism, and how much of it is deserved, and 
must develop a social responsibihty in the matter. At 
present the swing of the pendulum is far away from 
student responsibihty in athletics, with the despotic 
power of the coach, and the graduate or faculty man- 
ager. 

la our desire for victory we have lost some of the 
most powerful educational factors in our sports. For 
the coach to direct from the side lines, either openly or 
covertly, may be the best way to win and give the 
alumni a pleasant (and profitable) afternoon, but it is 
the worst way for the boys and particularly for the 
captains to learn lessons of responsibihty. As to the 
general influences of intercollegiate contests, the stu- 
dents should realize that what counts is not how many 
men keep from drinking by having a place on the ath- 
letic squad, but how many who do not play at all get 
drunk after the big games because the team has won, 
or lost. They must realize how serious is the waste of 
time about things which do not help athletics at all; 
the chatter about statistics of records, and the imdue 
devotion to the fetish of "supporting the team." 

Teachers of other subjects must realize that the pre- 
dominance of athletics is not wholly the fault of athlet- 



ATHLETICS 179 

ics. To put it frankly, other interests have not taken 
the same trouble. If athletics are over-developed, let 
other factors compete for the interests of the students. 
They look to athletics for color and vividness in their 
life. It is possible to get more of these qualities into 
the other parts of college life, including the classroom. 
After all, for many students this would not be very 
hard. Their real interest in athletics is pretty super- 
ficial. Such boys may talk about little else, but that is 
one of their conventions. 

Wise men may sometimes take advantage of the ups 
and downs of athletic success. It may or may not be 
a coincidence that it has been during a gloomy period 
in Yale athletics that that institution has shown a sur- 
prising intellectual renaissance, and that Harvard's 
athletic triumphs during the same period have been 
accompanied by a growth in conventionalism that is 
distressing to some of her best friends. 

In the general policy of the college, the athletic situ- 
ation must be considered not by itself, but as a part of 
the whole student Hfe. Those responsible must not be 
discouraged by its conventional prominence or by its 
existing evils. If there is any sting in the nettle, the best 
thing to do is to grasp it firmly. An intelligent policy, 
however, goes farther than a mere stamping-out of 
evils. There is always the danger, as the old saying 
goes, of throwing the baby out with the bath. The 



i8o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

essence of an intelligent policy must lie in sin emphasis 
upon the good qualities. Professor Josiah Royce has 
said, "We must always build on what we have, and 
therefore any hostility to the athletic Hfe is profoimdly 
objectionable." What we must do is to adopt a con- 
structive rather than a defensive policy. Blind unbe- 
lief is sure to err, and, as Professor Corwin has pointed 
out, we will never make progress with a house divided 
against itself, the faculty on one side and the students 
and alumni on the other. We must not close up this 
valuable laboratory in the art of living. The time 
seems to have come for the colleges to take away, even 
from the alumni, the responsibility and leadership in 
athletic matters. Particularly in the physical educa- 
tion departments the faculties are developing real ex- 
perts about the whole complicated business, and they 
are beginning to realize the power they possess, if they 
choose to exercise it. In the troublesome matter of the 
professional coach they need not be helpless unless they 
want to be. They can control his selection, and, as I 
have already said, bring him into the faculty when his 
influence is good. The path of progress often leads 
from neglect through repression to intelligent encour- 
agement, and in athletics it may be said that, having 
first endured, then pitied, the college authorities are 
about ready to embrace. 



CHAPTER VII 
RELIGION AND MORALS 

There is no section of our field of inquiry where it is 
harder to deal fairly with the material than the one 
which has to do with the rehgious and moral standards 
of imdergraduates. Much harm has been done, I think, 
by endeavoriQg to judge the present situation by mid- 
Victorian standards. If one compares, for example, the 
students of to-day with those of two generations ago 
on the basis, say, of church-going, there is no doubt as 
to the conclusion. Boys to-day don't go to formal re- 
ligious exercises, church or prayer meeting, as they 
used to — but neither do their parents, nor the boys 
who don't go to college. They no longer look upon an 
honest agnostic as a wicked man, nor upon a fellow- 
student of a different faith as less likely to go to 
heaven. There are far fewer boys who are intensely 
interested in the saving of their own souls, but, on the 
other hand, there are, I firmly believe, many more who 
have really strong aspirations to be of service to other 
souls. Very often the beUefs of such students will not 
fit into the tenets of any of the conventional creeds 
— which may be all the worse for the creeds. 

In the matter of personal morahty, similarly, we 



1 82 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

must remember from how much more inclusive a back- 
ground our students come. Those of foreign stock 
bring with them very different standards, some worse 
and some better, than our own. We must also remem- 
ber that the present college generation coincides with 
a very bad period in parental relations. UTien our 
present undergraduates were in the nursery, the old 
disciplinary attitude, harsh but often effective, had 
broken down, and as yet no painstaking development 
of intimacy and mutual confidence had been built up 
to take its place. I am speaking, of course, in very 
general terms, but I am confident that better relations 
between fathers and sons are tending to develop, and 
that in many ways the boys now in short trousers will 
make better college material when their time comes. 
When we remember these things and others that will 
doubtless rise to the mind of the thoughtful reader, we 
must come to the conclusion that, although conditions 
are. Heaven knows, far from what we should like to 
have them, they are really not so discouraging after 
all. 

We sorely need a reclassification of virtues and vices 
before we can make any useful appraisal. New faults 
have sprung up which too often are not recognized as 
such. Careless inconsiderateness of others, for exam- 
ple; or lack of charity, let us say, in the application of 
the Christian system of ethics to the race of which 



RELIGION AND MORALS 183 

Christ was a member; or sinning against the intellec- 
tual light in various ways, as, for instance, carefully 
trained blindness as to athletic dishonesty. 

Regarding the more generally recognized forms of 
departure from the best standards, conditions vary 
widely in different colleges. None, I think, are the 
abominable sinks of which we hear from time to time 
in newspaper crusades. Low standards as to college 
admissions and promotion, however, mean a poorer 
and less disciplined type of student to deal with, and 
as an inevitable result the development and mainte- 
nance of bad student traditions in fraternities and gen- 
eral student life. I don't mean that all boys who can 
pass stiff examinations are, ipso facto, morally perfect, 
but those who are in a position to know can see a 
pretty close correlation between good intellectual 
standards and good moral standards. It is largely a 
question of a conflict of interests. Satan finds some 
mischief still for idle brains as well as idle hands. 

So far as drinking is concerned, athletics, and espe- 
cially all-the-year-round athletics, have done much, 
and so have the better fraternities. In the majority of 
chapter houses to-day no Hquor is permitted, and even 
though the original reason for the rule may have been 
to obtain donations from straight-laced alunmi, the 
gaieral effect is good. The man who drinks nothing is 



1 84 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

no longer regarded as a mollycoddle nor the man who 
drinks too much as an interesting and diverting com- 
panion. In this matter of drinking, college conven- 
tions and imitativeness often play an unfortunate part. 
A boy who feels no yearning for alcohol whatever will 
get drunk after the "big game" or at a fraternity ban- 
quet. It is certainly true, however, that men who de- 
velop an alcoholic craving in college are distinctly rarer 
than in former years. Personally I think there is more 
physical injury in the student body to-day from inces- 
sant smoking than from drinking. Although I have no 
personal knowledge on the subject, I am told there are 
some cases of drug addictions among college students, 
and in our present restless and hurried life this is a 
difficulty which may need careful watching as time 
goes on. 

Gambling is largely a matter of the local college tra- 
dition. Everywhere there is some betting on athletic 
events, but the increasing number of boys who have to 
earn their own is developing a salutary realization of 
what is best to do with money. Card-playing as a 
time- wasting factor is decreasing as a result of winter 
athletics and stricter standards as to college work to be 
performed. Card gambling is not a serious problem 
except at the colleges where boys are given more 
money than is good for them, where, as Dean Briggs 
says, they lull themselves with the idea that they are 



RELIGION AND MORALS 185 

playing with money (of which there seems to be an 
inexhaustible supply at home) rather than for it. 

As to sexual indulgence it is very hard to get at the 
facts. There is every reason, however, to discount the 
lurid stories from well-meaning but pestilential cranks 
about its awful prevalence, with their "statistics^' as 
to the percentage of college students infected by vene- 
real diseases. 

For a very considerable number of boys, the ques- 
tion of absolute continence was settled before going to 
college — the life of small country towns is notori- 
ously lax in these respects. Some of these boys con- 
tinue their practices and doubtless influence others, 
but more of them are brought under better influences 
while in college. Many boys, though I think their 
number is lessening, who are neither dnmkards nor 
roues, follow the crowd at one of the conventional 
times of saturnalia, breaking training or Sophomore 
Triumph, and bitterly regret the results of their lack of 
self-control. So far as my experience goes, however, 
the college student in good colleges, whose indulgence 
is deliberate and habitual, is the rare exception. We 
must remember, clear-cut as the issue may seem to 
us, that while civilized standards the world over 
frown upon extreme physical indulgence, it is only for 
those following the English Puritan tradition that 
this is a matter of right or wrong per se. Many of 



1 86 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

our students come from family backgrounds in which 
the Puritan tradition has never existed, or from which 
it has completely died out. On the other hand, the 
old argimient of biological necessity for indulgence has 
been pretty well exploded and we are feeling our way 
toward a frank and wholesome basis of instruction in 
the hygiene of the whole matter. This will make its 
appeal, not by endeavoring to inculcate fear of the 
personal results of infection, — fear is always a poor 
emotion to call upon, — but by using the idealism of 
which youth has a plentiful supply. In emphasizing 
what the family relation should be, boys can get a 
positive incentive to clean Kving which far outweighs 
any negative stimuli. When mothers, and more par- 
ticularly fathers, recognize their full responsibiUties to 
their growing children and meet them intelligently, 
the college will be able to build upon a far sounder 
foimdation than is the case at present. 

This question and those related to it are not matters 
that can be comfortably discussed in a book of this 
kind, and for further information the reader is referred 
to the most careful and temperate study in the writ- 
er's knowledge, that of Dr. Exner, of the International 
Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association. 
While we may draw some comfort from remember- 
ing that the conditions described in his study are not 
those specifically of the colleges, but of the commu- 



RELIGION AND MORALS 187 

nity at large, we must remember that it is the place of 
the colleges to do what they can, and they have al- 
ready done much, as natural leaders toward better 
standards. The influence of a good college doctor is 
an important factor; if he gains the confidence of the 
students, he has often the chance to relieve physical 
conditions which often He at the base of what appear 
to be moral delinquencies, and he has also the chance 
to weed out the unbalanced students, of whom there 
are a few in every community. 
Let me quote a paragraph from Dr. Exner's book: — 

This study must not be taken to indicate that a great 
amount of gross immorality exists among college students. 
This would be an unfair inference. It is true that serious 
immoral conditions do exist in some institutions, especially 
in those situated in or near cities having open prostitution. 
But on the whole college students are morally clean, much 
above the average, and the tendency is steadily on the up- 
grade. What is true among college students, however, is 
general prevalence of struggle with sex problems. This is 
another matter. We find a very large proportion of stu- 
dents in whom the subject of sex occupies altogether un- 
duly the field of consciousness and creates severe struggle 
for self-control. Often the finest of our men have their 
energy and attention taken up so largely with personal 
struggle as to seriously handicap their efficiency and to 
cause much mental misery. This is the natural outgrowth 
of the perverted and selfish interpretation of sex which the 
neglect of proper education in early years has forced upon 
them, and of the poisoning of the imagination which neces- 
sarily accompanies it. We find that the great majority of 



1 88 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

male students need to have their sex tliinking entirely re- 
constructed and the whole subject reinterpreted in higher 
terms. The whole subject needs for them to be lifted out 
of the sphere of vulgarity and depression into one of purity, 
dignity, and respect. They are much in need of construc- 
tive help in making a sensible fight for self-mastery and in 
reducing the sex problem to a minimum. Most of the sex 
teaching thus far has been on too purely a physical basis. 
The psychologic and ideaUstic aspects of the question need 
most to be stressed. It is such teaching that brings the 
best results with college men. The most pressing problem 
of the average college student is the hygiene of the imag- 
ination. 

It is usually assumed, as it has been by Dr. Exner, 
that conditions as to drinking and laxity in sexual 
relations are worse in the city universities than in 
the country colleges. In my judgment the real dis- 
tinction Hes, as I have said, between the colleges with 
good standards and those with bad; those from which 
the rotten apple is almost inevitably removed by fail- 
ure to meet the educational tests and those where it is 
permitted to remain indefinitely, to contaminate the 
rest of the barrel; those where the teachers and other 
ofi&cers earn the respect and confidence and often the 
intimacy of the students and succeed in interesting 
them in wholesome intellectual pleasures, and those 
where the students get no help of this kind from the 
faculty and are chronically idle-minded and bored. 
A friend of mine, a national oflGlcer in one of the well- 



RELIGION AND MORALS 189 

known fraternities, tells me that he has had constant 
trouble with the undergraduates in these regards at 
certain institutions situated in the country or in 
small cities, but only very rarely at the chapters in 
the strong city universities. Of course one cannot 
guarantee the moral integrity of any boy in any col- 
lege, but the environmental influences are very impor- 
tant factors for any student body as a whole. 

The question of what constitutes a religious man is 
no longer a simple one. We find in college, as elsewhere, 
men who conform closely and without conscious hy- 
pocrisy to the observances of the religious creed in 
which they have been brought up, but whose souls are 
dead within them; and side by side with them others, 
openly boasting of their freedom from doctrinal tram- 
mels of every kind, who give every minute they can 
spare to work among the destitute. Certainly the 
emphasis, even among the professedly orthodox, is 
less and less on matters of dogma and observance and 
more and more on social service of various kinds. The 
majority of students, like the Ancient Mariner, believe 
that he prayeth best who loveth best. 

Compulsory chapel attendance is disappearing, and 
where it is retained through student opinion it is often 
pretty frankly as a factor in keeping up college spirit. 
Even in denominational colleges there is very little 



I90 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

proselyting. The general church agencies often desig- 
nate some local clergyman or "chaplain" to see that 
the boys of their faith do not stray from the fold. In 
general, however, there are no denominational clubs 
except among the Episcopalians, who are likely to have 
a more or less separate group, or among the Roman 
Catholics, who are coming in rapidly increasing num- 
bers to non-Catholic colleges. The Newman Club, as it 
is usually called, is carefully watched over by Mother 
Church and has often an imposing building for its 
headquarters. It is but fair to say that her activities 
in this direction, so far as I have observed, are rather 
the result of the anti-Catholic campaigns which occur 
from time to time than the reason for them. The 
orthodox Jews have their Menorah Society, to empha- 
size the historic traditions of the race, and to com- 
bat the cynical agnosticism which is very prevalent 
among its yoimger men. 

As in the world at large, interest in religious matters 
has its ups and downs. Certain leaders, differing as 
widely in personality and attainments as John R. 
Mott and Dean Brown of Yale and Billy Sunday, con- 
duct meetings which exert a powerful influence on 
college communities. At these meetings there are 
fewer conversions than in earlier days, but there is an 
imdoubted quickening of religious interests — with 
results often lamentably brief as to the student body in 



RELIGION AND MORALS 191 

general, but with permanent influence upon not a few 
individuals. 

The larger institutions often have their own chap- 
lains, but speaking generally the active day-by-day 
religious agency in the American college is the Young 
Men's Christian Association. Its work throughout the 
colleges is pretty well standardized by the eflBicient ad- 
ministrative control and guidance of a central group of 
very able men. These men watch conditions closely, 
and their growing emphasis on the constructive side of 
religious activities is significant. They recognize that 
the college is no longer a place to be shielded from the 
world, but that the men in college must come into con- 
tact, particularly in social service, with what is going 
on outside. Accordingly, much of its work is really 
extra-mural. It provides settlement workers and plans 
week-end deputations of undergraduates to near-by 
coimtry towns, and it supports missionary movements. 
The imdergraduates and alumni of some colleges ac- 
tually maintain a missionary college in China or else- 
where. The Association has done work of twofold 
value in organizing social work in industrial certers, 
which not only gives help to those who sorely need it, 
but provides for not a few undergraduates their first 
realization of the tremendous social problems which 
must be faced and mastered by the employers of to- 
morrow. A recent example of what the Association can 



192 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

do with its world-wide organization and its prompt 
realization of opportunity is the work supported by 
American students and largely carried out by them 
in the prison camps of Europe. 

Nor does the Association neglect the opportunities 
that He at its doors. It does much to help the freshmen 
to find themselves, and it pays particular attention to 
foreign students, of whom there are surprisingly large 
numbers in the university colleges. The Association's 
equipment is usually excellent. It is likely to have a 
good building and an able young man to run it, and to 
be very practical in its methods of getting men to use 
the building. Lectures on subjects of general interest 
to students are arranged, such as first aid, professional 
ethics, the human side of engineering, etc., and men 
to whom the student body looks up for other reasons 
are carefully identified with its work. The Association 
has been a very important factor in improving the 
moral conditions in colleges and college environ- 
ments. 

It is with no desire to belittle its striking services^ 
that I question whether the Association completely 
meets the needs of to-day. Its methods of attack have 
become pretty thoroughly conventionalized — who, for 
example, would not recognize the Y.M.CA. hand- 
shake? — and they are acutely irritating to many 
students to whom religious matters are essentially 



RELIGION AND MORALS 193 

intimate and personal. Others are alienated by its 
prudent attitude in refraining from taking a vigorous 
stand as to athletic evils which must sometimes be a 
veritable stench in the nostrils of its workers. The 
delegates to the intercollegiate exercises seem some- 
times to be selected quite as much on the basis of ath- 
letic prowess as of spiritual earnestness. Sometimes 
the Association leader takes part, unrebuked by his fel- 
lows, but not unobserved by the outsider, in some shck 
fraternity deal. 

In a desire to be practical, the Association has in a 
large degree lost the sense of the mystery of religion 
and of the possibility of appeal through those aesthetic 
influences which through the ages have been perhaps 
the most potent of all. To a boy with a touch of the 
mystic in him, and there are many such, an efficiency 
engineer is worse than useless. In any college the men 
are not rare, who, whether they know it or not, are 
essentially religious in nature, but who are too honest 
to subscribe even by implication to the creed of the 
Association, broad and liberal as it is, and who for that 
reason find no organized outlet for their aspirations. 

Whether any one agency can do more than the 
Young Men's Christian Association now does, in view 
of the highly different types to be found in a modern 
college, is a very debatable question. Certainly within 
its chosen limits the work is admirable, and time may 



194 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

develop agencies to influence the boys whom it does 
not reach. 

To sum up conditions, as compared with those, say, 
of the seventies or eighties, there is less orthodoxy, 
much less hypocrisy, and far stronger recognition of the 
elements of service. There are as many men as ever 
who, so far as conduct is concerned, are guided by a 
given set of working ideals, but too many of them, and 
their number includes some of the finest men in our 
colleges, are untouched by religious agencies and are 
learning to live their lives with no provision for any 
religious element whatever. This to my mind is one of 
the most serious problems which the present genera- 
tion is leaving for solution to those which are to follow. 



CHAPTER VIII 
INTELLECTUAL LIFE 

Cogito, ergo sum. Man is the thinking animal, and 
colleges are maintained at great public and private ex- 
pense to help him in his thinking. How much real think- 
ing do college students do? A great deal more than 
they usually get credit for. Folly is always more con- 
spicuous than wisdom, and there is, alas, enough of the 
former in our colleges to make it difficult sometimes to 
perceive the latter. Most of the thinking is done in the 
good colleges. Not that there are not boys with good 
brains and the art of using them who are still in the 
bad ones, just as there are operatives in mills and 
clerks in counting houses, but they are the exceptions, 
and the colleges which enroll them deserve httle credit 
for them and have comparatively little to do with their 
development. We must realize that even in the best 
institutions there are two classes of students who come 
to college — the socially minded and the intellectually 
minded; but even though it may be over-sanguine to 
refer to any ''industrious revolution," it is a fact that 
an increasing number of those who are primarily so- 
cially minded on entrance are intellectually minded 
when they graduate. 



196 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

It is now eight years ago since President Lowell 
delivered a Phi Beta Kappa address at Columbia on 
*^ Competition in College," which was reprinted in the 
"Atlantic" and attracted wide attention. In this he 
called attention to the only too evident fact that com- 
petition in scholarship had been "almost banished" 
from our colleges. In these eight years we cannot say 
that it has been almost restored, even in the stronger 
colleges, for in them the students still make their con- 
ventional distinctions between study and pleasure, but 
it is fair to say that the tide has turned, and that in 
eight more years it should be possible to point to some 
tangible results. 

I have spoken elsewhere in this book of the new 
policy in these colleges of aiming higher than the 
bottom of the class. This is already having its results. 
Failure is regarded as a good deal more of a disgrace 
than it was in my time. Then getting an "F," like 
getting drunk, was too often regarded as an amus- 
ing performance. Now the corresponding under- 
graduate desires to be an able "C" man (though he 
wouldn't boast about being an able fourteen-second 
man in the hundred). The element of rivalry is, how- 
ever, creeping in and is beginning to have its effects. 
In the contest for the fraternity cup, he has no vision 
of seeing his chapter "lead all the rest," but he is will- 
ing to exert himself slightly to perform his share in 
keeping ahead of the Alpha Delts. 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 197 

The men who are headed toward the professions go 
farther. They are rather rapidly learning the fallacy in 
the old saying that you should have your good time in 
college because there is plenty of time for your hard 
work in the professional school. Let those still in doubt 
read President Foster's article in the September, 191 6, 
''Harper's Magazine," in which he has collected all 
the classic instances of statistical researches as to the 
correlation of undergraduate distinction in scholarship 
and later professional success. Of course, all these 
statistics prove a Kttle too much, because it is the nat- 
urally able boy who tends to do well wherever he is, 
but they nevertheless throw a strong burden of proof 
on the boy who thinks he can afford to do less than his 
best in college. There is such a thing as a reduction in 
natural ability, by physical dissipation, as happens to 
hundreds of students in the European universities, or 
by mental dissipation and by the development of bad 
mental habits, as is more likely to be the cause over 
here. 

All this is to the good, but what we want to achieve 
is a general appreciation of and striving for excellence 
for its own sake — of hard thinking for the fun of it. 

The old incentives were rewards and pimishments, 
which developed to an extraordinary complexity. The 
reprobates were fined in order to provide prizes "for 



198 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

such as shall excell in the course of their studies." With 
these developed a certain rivalry for a place at the 
head of the class — this sometimes involved a particu- 
lar seat of honor — which meant something when the 
curriculum was uniform and all students were graded 
by the same man. With the elective system and the 
entry of the personal equation in difficulty of courses 
and generosity of grading, class standing provides far 
less stimulus. Even an election to Phi Beta Kappa, 
though the society retains a good deal of its old pres- 
tige, sometimes means merely a careful selection of 
courses and of teachers, and, of course, when this oc- 
curs it is recognized by the college group as a whole. 

In the old order the demands of the classroom were 
almost wholly for memorizing. Most of the thinking 
that was done was as to ways and means to circumvent 
and outrage the faculty, or in rare instances in the 
literary clubs and other student coteries. 

The emphasis on high average class standing and 
upon memory work in class developed the t3^e of 
student known as the "greasy grind." He still persists, 
sometimes having learned his ways in school and re- 
maining satisfied with the old incentives in college, but 
he is much less prevalent. It is only the blindest of the 
sons of rest in a college commimity who look down 
upon all high-stand students as grinds. The grind is 
the man who presumably can dp nothing else and 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 199 

wants to do nothing else but his lessons. This lies back 
of the common sentiment that a high-stand man must 
*'do something for the college," often at an absurd 
waste of his time, before being received among the 
elect. The self-centeredness and narrowness of the 
grind discount his obvious industry, a quality which 
these others might well emulate, but which discourage 
them from trying to break through his shell and give 
him the social training he usually sorely needs. Some 
grinds are hopeless, but many of them could be made 
into first-class citizens, even from the conventional 
student standpoint. 

The new ideals of college administration and teach- 
ing, which have really been imder headway only since 
Mr. Lowell's paper was published, are all working to 
stimulate intellectual rivalry in the better colleges. 
The higher standards of admission have enabled the 
pace in the classroom to be speeded up, an important 
factor, for the boredom of a bright boy in a group of 
dullards and the habits of inattention which he ac- 
quires to avoid such boredom are not trivial dangers. 
The individual attitude toward all students brings to 
light promising material for direct attack. Better 
organization and presentation of teaching material are 
even more important for the able boy than for the 
others, the waste of his time being more expensive 



aoo THE UNDERGRADUATE 

directly and indirectly. The growing interest in under- 
graduate teaching is important, among other things, 
as looking forward to a broader conception of the 
teacher's function. The whole teaching of history, for 
example, has been revolutionized within a decade, and 
the titles of three recent articles which I came upon in 
looking up material for this book will further indicate 
what I mean: ** English as Training in Thought," by 
Professor Aydelotte; "The Humanization of the 
Teaching of Mathematics," by Professor Keyser; 
*'The Place of Chemistry in the Rehabilitation of the 
College," by Professor Alexander Smith. In the last 
named, the author asks the following pertinent ques- 
tion: "Can it be that all the unpleasant things that 
are being said are intended to apply to the whole 
structure of the American college, with the sole excep- 
tion of the department of chemistry?" 

Yale, Princeton, and other colleges have followed 
Columbia in the establishment of special honors pro- 
grammes, and Amherst is trying an interesting experi- 
ment in breaking up the senior class into seminar 
groups of ten men or more, "for the purpose of placing 
emphasis upon the broad aspects instead of scraps of 
learning, and a refusal to regard any course as separate 
by itself, but rather as a significant contribution to a 
broader insight into life." 

The colleges are not ashamed even of going back to 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE aoi 

the old stimuli. They not only sow beside all waters, 
but use all kind of fertilizer — old as well as new- 
fangled. Dean Jones is proposing to grade and rank 
the Yale students upon some equitable basis, and 
President Faunce at Brown announces the elections to 
Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi before the whole stu- 
dent body, assembled for the purpose. The various 
chapters of these societies are modifying their require- 
ments so that elections may coincide, more closely 
than has been the case in recent years, with the best 
faculty and student opinion as to intellectual abiHty 
and performance. 

The whole process of finding and stimulating the 
able boy — "the lad o^ pairts" as he is called in Scot- 
land, where he is perhaps best appreciated — is still 
groping and imperfect. For example, last winter I 
dropped a freshman on what appeared from the rec- 
ords to be an utterly unpromising terms work, and 
the youngster in his consequent retirement proceeded 
to write, and publish^ a rather striking little book on 
certain practical applications of algebra. 

And for the boys whom the dean doesn't drop 
there is too often pretty complete insulation from the 
things of the mind. One of the writers in the "New 
Republic" painted a picture not long ago which de- 
scribed the process and its results all too clearly. Let 
me quote a paragraph or two; for this is a type of 



102 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

college failure which deserves more consideration than 
it usually receives : — 

In college Albert achieved the right club after many 
nights of worry, and a rather strenuous campaign con- 
ducted by his mother. I saw something of Albert in those 
days when we were freshmen together, and he was always 
cordial when we were alone. In public he did not know me 
so well, and there were times in the month before his elec- 
tion when he did not know me at all. I did not mind, for I 
knew that election to the club meant all the dijfference be- 
tween success and failure. Albert could have lost his de- 
gree and laughed about it with the feeling of a good loser, 
but the club he required to give meaning to his life. He 
"made" it, and was never afterwards seen without the 
striped necktie which was its mark. No other ambition 
troubled Albert in college. . . . 

After graduation Albert entered his father's bank and 
was elected to the right club. From these two foci Albert 
gathers all the opinions he displays. Of course he has never 
known it. Albert is not the sort of person to admit that 
opinions, like people, have a birthplace, a family tradition, 
and a basis in income. Whatever Albert believes he be- 
lieves to be self-evident. There is not a touch of insincerity 
in him, for it is entirely beyond the range of his mentality to 
realize that what everybody says at the bank and the club 
is not a norm of sanity and decency. ... 

This is Albert to-day, and with this equipment he faces 
the future. He is going to be very rich and his power is sure 
to be very great. He will be quoted in the newspapers. He 
will dine with editors and statesmen. Albert is one of those 
men who have power thrust upon them, and his opinions 
will carry more weight than a million humbler men's. 

As I look upon Albert's education I can't help trem- 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 203 

bling a little. Those nurse girls, valets, chauffeurs and 
butlers who encased his youth, that school where the ideal 
was a gentleman who had brushed against dead languages, 
the college course insulated in the best club, the bank where 
he met his own kind, the dances and week-end parties 
where the social inbreeding is almost incestuous, have 
given Albert a sense that his world is all the world. I worry 
at the thought that he will grow up to govern, whether in 
office or out of it, to govern industry and influence politics, 
to command the loyalty of America. . . . 

I know Albert for what he is, a charming, well-mannered, 
unconscious snob, who knows nothing of men outside his 
class, an uneducated, untrained, and shut-in person who 
has been bom to power by the accident of wealth. 

One question regarding the intellectual life of stu- 
dents which it is hard to answer is how much worth 
while reading they do "on their own hook.*' The new 
methods of teaching with prescribed and recommended 
reading mean a great increase in not wholly voluntary 
reading, which is excellent when the interest of the stu- 
dent is properly stimulated in advance by the teacher. 
When, however, it is just a dehumanized imposition, 
too often it is not only a waste of time, but it develops 
in the students an immunity from any danger of ever 
looking at the same books again. Of course, in these 
days of motors and movies, and the "Saturday Eve- 
ning Post," the standard book as a means of relaxation 
has more serious competition than ever before, and 
the habit of serious reading is distressingly rare. Still 



204 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

some students do read. A year or so ago the librarian 
of the University of Minnesota asked three hundred 
and fifty seniors to report their reading for a year. Of 
the one hundred and sixty who replied, one hundred and 
thirty-four had read the " Pilgrim's Progress," eighty 
"Faust," sixty-six "Tess," eighty-five "The Auto- 
crat," eighty-five some play of Ibsen, seventy-seven 
the "Bluebird," fifty-nine "Diana of the Crossways," 
one hundred and thirty- two "Gulliver," one hundred 
and three "Tom Sawyer," Forty-four standard books 
upon the list were reported as read by more than half 
of the students. Probably a good many of the books 
were prescribed, and probably also the girls in the class 
raised the average, but in any case the showing is not so 
bad as it might be. Thirty years ago serious-minded 
boys, upon the advice of recognized authorities, read 
certain books to round out their culture, but nowa- 
days no two experts are in agreement as to what cul- 
ture is or is going to be, and the corresponding youth 
of this generation is inclined to wait until some con- 
clusion has been reached in the matter. It is interest- 
ing in this connection to note that a distinguished 
American critic, Mr. William C. Brownell, is inclined 
to blame the elective system in our colleges for the 
*' absence of standards and the sure taste which comes 
of specialization in study." 
I have a theory that students would read more if 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 205 

college library administration retained less of the old- 
fashioned attitude of suspicion toward the student. It 
is signijficant that this is almost the only branch of 
educational machinery in which fines persist. The fact 
that the incentive for the purchase of books comes from 
specialists often means the existence of surprising gaps 
for the general reader. I myself had to plead not so 
many years ago for a complete set of Meredith in the 
Columbia Library. The huge railway-station type of 
reading-room has its chilling effect, whereas the cozy 
libraries of such places as Haverford are so rare that 
even the visiting stranger is promptly tempted to sit 
down and pick up a book. 

To return to direct intellectual stimuli, I think it is 
true that not only individual teachers in the class- 
room, but the same men in faculty meeting, — where 
they are sometimes hardly recognizable by their 
works, — are learning something of student psychol- 
ogy. Largely through the growing confidence of stu- 
dents, they are often able to get the real student point 
of view, shorn of its encircling conventions; for the real 
critkism of an intelligent student is a very different 
thing from the official ** bellyaching" of a college edi- 
torial. One of my students, by no means a shining 
light so far as grades go, recently proposed a carefully 
thought-out scheme for encouraging a spirit of intel- 



2o6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

lectual rivalry among the sections into which large 
classes are to-day being broken up. I don't know 
whether the scheme will work, but we are going to try 
to find out. 

Teachers are learning that, though it is a convention 
that one must love idleness and ensue it, boys really 
prefer to be absorbed. This is one reason why, when a 
passing mark is all that the faculty seems interested in, 
students will rush into too many undergraduate activ- 
ities. The undergraduate engineering course, in spite 
of the narrowness of its curriculum, is a strong rival of 
the college for boys who have no serious intention of 
becoming engineers, just because the boys in it are 
given nQ time to be bored, and in a fraternity group in 
any college where both types of student are represented 
it is interesting to see that the alert faces are so often 
those of the professional students. This, however, is 
not the case when the college really makes a serious 
demand on the time and attention of its undergradu- 
ates, and when the teaching is what the students call 
''practical,'* though what they really mean is "vital.'' 
Teachers in these colleges are beginning to realize also 
that their boys can really be taught to respect accu- 
racy and to abhor slovenly thinking when the former is 
not debased into pedantry, nor intellectual order con- 
fused with meticulousness. The instinct for sound, 
clean workmanship in any field of activity is a real one, 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 207 

and the good teacher knows how to recognize and use 
it. Speaking of the fruits of learning some one has said 
that the result of the right kind of teaching of the right 
kind of subjects is like an apple growing upon the liv- 
ing tree, as contrasted, in the opposite case, with the 
apple stuck for purposes of adornment upon the 
Christmas tree. 

Another realization is that the tendency to form 
groups, even exclusive groups, is human, and may more 
profitably be used than combated. If boys will not 
work in the classroom, why not go outside it and get at 
them where they will work? As an answer to this ques- 
tion, professors are identifying themselves, sometimes 
wholly informally, sometimes by official designation, 
with the formation and carrying-on of these student 
clubs, semi-social, semi-intellectual in character, which 
are in themselves one of the most encouraging signs of 
the times. The departmental clubs are being organized, 
not only in obvious fields like geology, with its oppor- 
tunities for trips, and economics and politics, but with 
equal success in so superficially unpromising a subject 
as mathematics. 

The most picturesque of them is the Elizabethan 
Club at Yale, which is built around a priceless collec- 
tion of folios and first editions, given by an alumnus of 
wealth, not to the university, but to the club itself. 



2o8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

This, as might be expected, has really touched the im- 
aginations of the undergraduate members. To be sure, 
it is all a little conscious. When I visited the clubhouse, 
for example, the various members of 'Varsity teams in 
the reading-room were somehow brought to my atten- 
tion. But it is a princely experiment and has already 
done much to stimulate a love of letters at Yale. The 
weekly broadside "Bulletin" of Yale University, by 
the way, shows a wealth of intellectual opportunity 
outside the classroom which merits the attention of 
those who are prone to dismiss that university as an 
athletic college. 

Other schemes, less ambitious, are equally interest- 
ing. At Union, Professor Hale recently wrote a moral- 
ity play for the English Club and took part himself in 
the performance. I am sure the presentation of char- 
acters like "Athletics" and "Knocking" gave the stu- 
dents a keener realization of what the mediaeval origi- 
nals meant to the people who saw them than the most 
learned lecture could do. In the literary club at an- 
other college, the members in turn, under the guidance 
of one of the professors, wrote chapters in a serial novel 
— and it was n't a particularly bad novel at that. My 
own happiest hours in college I owe to a scheme of the 
late George Rice Carpenter, one of the pioneers in 
the elder-brotherly attitude toward students, which 
brought half a dozen of us together to start a new 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 209 

kind of college magazine. Never before or since has it 
proved so much fun to try to write. 

The instinct for self-expression is in us all and is 
strongest in youth. It is the lack of an opportunity in 
our industrial system, with its separate processes, to 
creak anything from start to finish, that Professor 
Holliday and others finds to be the underlying cause 
of industrial unrest and discontent. And the instinct is 
the most powerful lever at the hand of the college. In 
its highest developments within our field it means Kv- 
ing scholarship, just as in other fields it means the great 
picture or the beautiful building. Even when the pro- 
duction is halting and feeble, as in the nature of things 
it usually is, it may mean much to the producer. It 
may be a poor thing, but it is his own. 

The wise teacher knows this. He no longer attempts 
to keep the student in a receptive attitude of mind, 
since, as one of my colleagues says, the attitude we de- 
sire to cultivate in him is the precise opposite. Boys 
can be set upon a higher emprise than the learning of 
lessons out of a book or from the lips of some ipse dixit. 
He should, to quote other colleagues, be given the feel- 
ing ^' that he is creating something. This can be de- 
rived not only from manual work, but even more from 
intellectual effort, from the discovery of new facts, the 
solving of problems, the composing of themes. Stu- 
dents should be made to feel also the inspiration 



aio THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of intellectual adventure, in exploring new fields and 
in grappling with difficult tasks. . . . Nobody knows 
anything unless he is able to control a fact, a law or 
a force." Experience has shown that undergraduates, 
under friendly guidance, are capable of original scien- 
tific research that is often distinctly more than respect- 
able, and a history theme of one of my imdergraduates 
recently appeared in the "Forum.'* 

The spoken or written word, often the only form 
of self-expression possible, furnishes a harder prob- 
lem. Many are naturally tongue-tied, and others are 
hedged about by conventions of reticence, particu- 
larly in the East. Farther West, there is a tendency 
toward slopping over, which is equally imfortunate. 
I confess to a private hope that one result of the forces 
which are now at work will be a renaissance of the al- 
most extinct art of conversation, which is not only a 
natural, if neglected, form of self-expression, but fur- 
nishes an important stimulus toward more permanent 
forms. Any American who has had the opportimity to 
hear the talk of a group of young English imiversity 
men of intellectual interests will share my hope. 

Some boys who might contribute more than their 
share are embittered and rendered intellectually sulky 
by bad treatment. This is often true of the Jew, who, 
in spite of his wanderings, is still enough of an Oriental 
to need a sunny environment to bring forth his best 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE an 

fruit. On the other hand, there is such a thing as in- 
tellectual immodesty, and we all know individuals who 
suffer from it. Sometimes, however, these are boys 
who have been over-stimulated by their college ex- 
periences and who will settle down later on. 

In spite of adverse conditions, the amount of actual 
self-expression through Kterary and sometimes musical 
production in American colleges is important in range 
and quality. The proportion of our best American 
writers who served their apprenticeship as contribu- 
tors to college magazines is strikingly high, and the 
best imdergraduate work itself not infrequently shows 
realization as well as promise. College verse in partic- 
ular is often really excellent. 

One manifestation of this tendency of students to do 
their own thinking and to express the results in their 
own way is causing much alarm among the older gener- 
ation. Colleges are stigmatized as hotbeds of Social- 
ism and all the other abhorrent isms. Of course, this is 
partly merely a manifestation of the eternal conflict 
between the generations. The escape of the young 
from the old is to-day, according to Mrs. Parsons, "the 
most important if but little noticed social fact of our 
times." History warns us that it is the customary fate 
of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as super- 
stitions, and the grandfather of the college Socialist of 



212 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

to-day probably spoke under his breath of being an 
evolutionist. The form of conflict at present is deter- 
mined by the fact that, broadly speaking, the focus of 
intellectual interest to-day is in the social sciences. It 
is only a few years since the battlefield was in theology 
and biology. 

President Meiklejohn, of Amherst, tells us of "fa- 
thers in planning for the training of a son who would 
see to it that in the preparation for his trade every 
bit of knowledge he could have must be applied, and 
the boy must learn that in such a way as to be the 
leader and the guide, that he may give orders rather 
than obey them. But how often the same father is un- 
willing that his boy attempt to imderstand his own re- 
ligion, his own morals, his own society, his own politics! 
In these fields, surely the father's opinions are good 
enough! Keep the boy's mind at rest regarding his 
rehgion and his economics; what has been believed 
before had better still be believed." 

How recent is the grip which economic and social 
problems have on our students is shown by the fact 
that in Dean Briggs's most discerning books about col- 
lege students, published hardly more than a decade 
ago, one finds very sHght, if any, mention of them. 

It may be of some comfort to the older generation to 
remember that professional radicals in the world out- 
side mourn equally loudly over the blindness of college 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 213 

students to the really important things of life. "Noth- 
ing/' says the author of the "Profane Baccalaureate," 
"could be more respectable than the colleges and 
less revolutionary. The elaborate inutility of college 
studies, the withdrawal of college from the affairs of the 
world, the upbuilding of a petty college principality 
with a ridiculous little college patriotism, manners, 
and standards of its childish own; the contact of that 
secluded world with the great world only through the 
medium of commercialized amateur sport; the parochi- 
alism of college intellectuality." And there is a pro- 
foimd suspicion of the American college on the part 
of the lower classes on the ground that it represents 
"enlightened despotism" rather than democracy. 

Owing to the fact that the college is a pretty com- 
plete cross-section of American humanity, the truth 
lies between these extreme opinions. How much do 
the great movements of changing values touch the un- 
dergraduate? It is hard to say. Certainly the boys at 
Columbia would not now jump in to break up a Sub- 
way strike as they did ten years ago, just for a lark, 
and without at least trying to find out what the men 
were striking for. Many, however, are really only 
playing at being Socialists, and in general it is the more 
spectacular aspects of any new cult that appeal to 
them. They will have none of the decorous radicalism 



214 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of the "New Republic.'' It must be "The Masses" 
or nothing. 

On the other hand, radical ideas do get their hold on 
certain individuals "good and proper/' but whether 
these cases are due to the college environment or in 
spite of it, I would n't venture to say. Entirely apart 
from the question of whether these radicals are right 
or wrong, by the way, their convictions usually give 
the possessors an excellent chance to display moral 
courage and some of us who may not agree with them 
rejoice in this by-product. Many of these college radi- 
cals become professional agitators after graduation, a 
fact which the consei-vatives should welcome, but 
don't. Is n't it important that the mass of the ignorant 
dissatisfied should be leavened by men (and women) 
who realize, as their companions do not and cannot, 
that mankind has a past as well as a present and a 
future, and that this past has its lessons to teach, — 
for example, regarding social experiments that have 
been tried and found wanting, — and who realize 
that there is such a process as thinking a question 
through? 

Strange as it may seem, there is a certain advantage 
to the intellectual interests from the fact that they 
are so much out of the conventional swing. Some of 
us will recall President Lowell's description of an 
apocryphal island in the Southern Pacific where the 



INTELLECTUAL LIFE 215 

college course consisted of prescribed athletics, which 
the students neglected as much as they dared in 
order to devote themselves to reading, writing, and 
debating. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE FINISHED PRODUCT 

There ought, of course, to be no such thing as a 
finished college product. What the college should give 
is the art of remaining unfinished, of going on learning 
through life. In one sense, however, it is fair to regard 
the alumni as a finished product — sometimes, alas, 
they are finished, so far as intellectual progress goes. 
In a broad sense they represent our best basis of ap- 
praisal of the results and values of the training of any 
college in particular, and of colleges in general; and, 
furthermore, they must be reckoned with under our 
American scheme of college government as a very vital 
influence upon the present and future of the institu- 
tions they have left. Our judgment of colleges by their 
alumni to be of value, however, must be made on a 
very general basis. It is easy to over-estimate the part 
played by the college in the development of any par- 
ticular man ; his native ability and his previous training 
and environment and the degree of his immersion in 
other interests after graduation must all be taken into 
account. One is likely, also, to make an inaccurate 
judgment of a college from the product of even a few 
years back. Colleges are developing so rapidly, for 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 217 

better or worse as the case may be, that older alumni 
are not likely to represent the present product with 
any degree of accuracy. 

It must be remembered, also, that it is the conven- 
tional-minded alumnus, rather than the individualist, 
who fits into and gives the note to alumni activities. 
Another thing to be remembered is that no social dis- 
tinction is made between the man who has his diploma 
and the man who has not, or even between the 
*'quituate" and the "bustitute." Some of the best and 
most useful children of any college have failed, for one 
reason or another, of formal graduation. Often the 
reason is most creditable to the man concerned. He 
may, for example, have had to leave in order to help 
out at home or to give a yoimger brother or sister a 
chance. The only point I want to make is that the 
colleges are represented and judged in large part by 
these cases where the institution was unable or un- 
willing to finish the job, and that in organized alumni 
activities there is always a strong representation of 
those who loved college life, not wisely, but too well. 

The relative prominence of alumni is also confusing. 
It not infrequently happens that some man who is not 
really representative of the best that his college can 
produce, but who wants his place in the sun, will push 
himself forward along the only line open to him, in his 
capacity as alumnus; and the effect of his identification 



2i8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

in local communities is sometimes rather unfortunate 
for the college. Not long ago I cut out the following 
newspaper letter written from the New York Club of 
one of our best-known universities, for preservation as 
a document humaine: — 

Why all this hullabaloo about a few college students who 
failed to know about the habits, customs, and lives of a few 
rulers in this fearful tangle across the seas? Are college men 
expected to know so much more than the ordinary man ? 
They are human and not latest editions of the encyclopae- 
dia. As a matter of fact, the average college student has 
little time for the daily papers, and while not engaged in 
locating the cosine of x or scanning the works of Byron, he 
is usually perfecting his mind and body to carry on the 
work of his country. And what is more beneficial and help- 
ful than good, clean athletics ? 

What is the general impression on the public of the 
present-day product? Underlying all the superficial 
criticism, it is really pretty favorable. So far as the 
learned professions are concerned, the lack of a college 
degree is a very great handicap, an imf airly heavy one 
in many cases. In business, college graduates are no 
longer looked on with suspicion, but are eagerly bidden 
for at commencement time. They are pretty well paid 
at the start, and rise much more rapidly than the 
average. The average earnings of the graduates of the 
Class of 1906 at Yale who went into business were 
reported as follows; — 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 219 

In the first year $ 705 

second 1061 

third 1516 

fourth 1931 

fifth 2405 

Even making deductions for a picked group and 
for the fact that their chances were probably better 
than the average, this is a remarkable showing. 

The college man has a good reputation for resource- 
fulness. He is often given a chance to show what he 
can do in some new field just because he is a college 
man. Another equally recognized asset is that he is 
socially agreeable, cheerful, and adaptable. He is 
ambitious — the sin by which certain angels fell, but 
by which many who are neither angels nor geniuses 
have risen. If he appears a little bumptious at first, it 
is imderstood that this can soon be knocked out or 
laughed out of him. 

On the other hand, he is often criticized, and often 
justly, for lack of accuracy and for slovenliness, and 
less frequently for lack of industry. Several years ago 
a classmate of mine sent me a letter of application for 
a position from a graduate, not in this case from our 
own but from another pre-revolutionary institution of 
learning. I wish I could reproduce the writing and the 
general lay-out of the letter, but the wording itself is 
worth reproduction: — 



220 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Dear Sir. Having read your ad in todays world in regard 
to a private secretary and being just out of college I would 
like to get such a position. My age is 21 and at present 

I am not employed having but rec'd my degree from 

this year. Would very much like to have a personal inter- 
view with you. 

Respectively yours 
(Name quite illegible) 



Ave 



To make it all the worse, my friend sent, also, two or 
three excellent letters from foreign-born and trained 
applicants which he had received in the same mail. 
The concluding paragraph of his own letter is signifi- 
cant: — 

I make no complaint against the American youth, but 
only against the method of educating him. Combine the 
American energy and brain with a thorough education in 
the essentials as given in the best schools abroad and we 
would really begin to see things happen! 

Personally, I think the colleges are to-day providing 
better training in matters of this kind, and the boys 
themselves are maintaining higher standards as to 
accuracy and order; and although examples as bad as, 
or worse than, the foregoing can be brought forward 
against any of the better colleges, they would be, I 
think, much less common to-day and increasingly rare 
as time goes on. 

When the employer seeks the advice of the college 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 221 

before engaging a man, he fares far better than when 
he does not. The National City Bank of New York 
and other large enterprises select their men only after 
careful examination of their records and consultation 
with their teachers and deans, and as a result they do 
not waste time and energy on material that the colleges 
know to be below average. An interesting feature, by 
the way, of the training courses at the National City 
Bank is an informal self-criticism of the students. 
Their comments as to their own business efficiency are 
to be published by the bank and should receive wide 
circulation through the colleges. 

The social training which a boy has received in the 
give-and-take of a wholesome college life stands him in 
good stead in after Ufe. A man of first-rate intellectual 
power is not infrequently passed over because he un- 
wittingly errs in appearance or maimer on the side 
either of a certain scrubbiness or of an even more un- 
fortunate "nobbiness.** Accepted social conventions, 
after all, are like office systems. They may become 
rigid bonds for the little man, but they save the time 
and attention of the big man, and leave him free to 
exercise his individuality and live his life. 

But the only test of college education is not in the 
making of money. How does he live? So far as general 
conduct goes, his reputation is high and deservedly so. 



212 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

He has a good record as to public service. The college 
man in politics is no longer a joke, but a power to be 
reckoned with both as to numbers and effectiveness. 
And in social enterprises of all kinds college men are 
more generally represented than would be the normal 
expectation from their numbers. I have already re- 
ferred, in the opening chapter of this book, to the 
college man as a public asset in times of national 
emergency like the present. 

As to his inner life, and particularly his intellectual 
life, opinion is varied. Lea^dng out, perhaps, half the 
men who go on into learned callings, the proportion of 
alumni who have either never learned or who have 
forgotten the pleasures and profits that come from 
good books, intellectual conversation, and intellectual 
hobbies, and serious contemplation, is far too high. 
Many of them have a vague feeling that something is 
expected of them, which too often merely leaves them 
the prey of the book agent with his installment sets of 
'^standard works" often by second-rate authors, and 
always in second-rate editions, if handsome bindings. 
And even these are usually left imread. The whole 
question of education for the wise use of leisure is too 
often overlooked in this country. Success in a business 
or professional career is a barren triumph, if, when the 
means in time and money to gratify a man's individual 
tastes have come, he finds himself without intellectual 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 223 

or aesthetic tastes to gratify. Here again, however, 
the academic optimist has hopes of better things from 
the boys now in college, and younger alumni, particu- 
larly those with college wives, are already taking ad- 
vantage of extension courses and other opportunities 
for keeping intellectually alive. 

To me the most pitiful examples of college failures 
are the men who learned little or nothing but how to 
be trailers when they were undergraduates. On a late 
afternoon before the war dozens of such college grad- 
uates could be found looking out of the club win- 
dows on Fifth Avenue, sleek, well-groomed, a corps of 
''Alberts." Each had been a schoolboy full of aspira- 
tions and ideals, but his soul had been clogged with con- 
ventions and imitations of the real things, so that he 
has been held back when his chance came to step out 
as a leader, if, indeed, he saw the chance at all. The 
saddest part of it is that these men are usually those 
whom God has pleased to call to an estate where 
qualities of broad-minded, intellectual, and moral 
leadership would be of particular value to the com- 
munity at large. 

In justice to these men it should be said that many of 
them have come forward bravely enough to take their 
places as soldiers and sailors, but their "bit" would 
be far more valuable to their coimtry to-day if their 
lamps had been trimmed and ready for the emergency. 



224 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

College conventions, both temporary and penna- 
nent, are carried on into alumni life in an interesting 
way. It is coming to be the fashion for the classes to 
celebrate their academic birthdays which end in "5" 
or '^o" by some special activity at commencement. 
This fashion involves the printing of pamphlets or even 
books. It was very amusing to study the publications 
of the Columbia classes of 1876 and 1906 and to see 
how faithfully are reflected the college life and interests 
of the day; and yet even the forty-year production 
showed the influences of present-day college con- 
ventions. 

To these inherited traditions must be added certain 
others which have sprung up with the elaborate or- 
ganization of alumni activities as such. Being an 
alumnus is coming almost to be a profession in itself. 
When you hear a man described as a *' professional' ' 
Princeton man, or Yale man, you get a pretty accurate 
picture of the alumnus in question. These permanently 
professional alumni set a standard for those who are 
more or less like anybody else for most of the year, but 
who at the appointed times and seasons take on the 
attributes of the professional almnnus. One of these 
attributes, that of setting a very bad example to the 
undergraduates as to drinking, is happily falling into 
disrepute, and Yale has this year set the admirable 
precedent of a " dry ' * commencement. 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 225 

Of course there are many alumni who don't appear 
as such at all, and we are prone to forget how large 
their number is. They are scattered, and for the most 
part silent, though they sometimes protest in alumni 
journals and elsewhere about things in general or in 
particular. 

One social phenomenon which may be inevitable, but 
is certainly unfortunate, is the crowding of college 
alumni into the great cities. In the country or the 
smaller towns they would have better opportunities 
for a reasonable success, earlier chance to marry and 
start families, and, in general, wider opportunities for 
usefulness. The young men, however, are dazzled by 
the few great prizes in the metropoKtan cities, and no 
matter where the college is situated, the *'big" alumni 
dinner must nearly always be held in New York or 
Chicago. The country sorely needs a wider distribu- 
tion of its college men, and particularly of its more 
able college men. 

I said at the outset that one of the significant things 
about the alumni was their influence individually and 
as groups upon their colleges. The direct influence 
of individual alumni on the students trickles down 
from father to son, or from other alumni to the 
boys whom they have persuaded to go to college, or 
from alumni members to undergraduate members in 



226 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

the student organizations; the loyal alumni brethren, 
for example, who come back to fraternity meetings or 
interest themselves, as so many do, in oversight of 
the financial ajffairs of the chapter. In athletics the 
influences up to a few years ago were nearly always 
bad. The alumni lobby was a real menace; it still is 
in many colleges, and its members sometimes continue 
to display the same ideals and practices as the sport- 
ing man who promotes prize-fights from his saloon on 
Fourteenth Street or his Broadway cafe. 

From widely different motives alumni are returning 
in greater numbers each year to their colleges. The 
visits at commencement or for the final football game 
are not of particular significance, because they are 
largely due to a sense that it is the thing to do, and on 
such occasions they pay Httle attention to the students 
or the students to them, except, perhaps, that the 
latter may smile with the kindly superiority of youth 
upon middle-aged antics. But when a man goes back 
alone or with a friend or two, at a time when the college 
is neither a pageant nor a hippodrome, he often has a 
chance to do a great deal of good or of harm. There is 
the baleful alumnus who comes back for an undetected 
spree or to enjoy the bad eminence of being a cynical 
man of the world before an admiring circle of juniors. 
Others, who do not realize how much water has run 
under the bridge since their time, try to restore the 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 227 

pristine virtues which in their day were marked by a 
proper contempt for the faculty and all its works. 

Sometimes the efforts of those who really try to un- 
derstand existing conditions, and if necessary to im- 
prove them, seem rather futile, it must be admitted. 
I think the influence on athleticism and exaggerated 
fraternity life is usually not deliberate, but is due to 
the fact that these are the easiest things to talk about. 
Conversation upon the boys' studies, for example, 
might betray an embarrassing rustiness on the part of 
the elder. The students, however, are confirmed in 
their tendency to believe that the former are the only 
things worth talking about. 

Nearly always the conscious influence of the alunmi 
is conservative and exerted along conventional hues. 
The social colleges tend to send their graduates into 
front-window jobs and they become bond salesmen 
and the like. These alumni usually have time and 
opportimity to return to their colleges, and their in- 
fluence upon the students is to emphasize the tradi- 
tional habit of mind and attitude toward the world. 
Alumni exercise little influence, if any, toward radical- 
ism, not because many alumni are not radicals, but 
because these alumni radicals are likely to be men who 
were too individualistic to fit into the social scheme 
when they were undergraduates, and hence have no 
clubs to return to. 



228 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

One most important influence of the alumni comes 
from their part in getting boys to go to college. Wher- 
ever the entering class has been questioned on the sub- 
ject in any college not close to a great center of popu- 
lation, it is the influence of some alumnus which is 
usually shown to be the moving cause for a student's 
selection of that particular institution. Leaving out 
the cases of athletic purchases, which are conspicuous 
rather from their flagrancy than from their number, 
the alumnus interests himself in some boy he likes, 
which usually means a boy who is like himself, and 
this tends to fix the institutional type. High-school 
teachers are perhaps the most influential sources of 
supply, followed by clergymen and doctors, though 
often a lawyer or business man will make it possible 
for a promising office boy to get an education at his old 
college. Though some pretty poor stuff comes from 
over-enthusiastic alumni, this recruiting in general is 
good for the college. Sometimes, however, it is rather 
hard on the boy if the recruiter has not kept familiar 
with the downward progress of his alma mater in 
academic standards, or if he thinks or pretends to 
think that, after all, these don't matter very much. 

The influence of the alumni on the policies and for- 
tunes of the college is of very great, often of control- 
ling, importance. When a new president is to be ap- 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 229 

pointed, he is first sought for and usually found among 
the alumni. Other things being equal, a teacher prefers 
a chair at his own college, and in some of them there 
is a dangerous degree of inbreeding. Trustees are usu- 
ally alumni, and in most colleges some are the direct 
representatives on the board of their fellow-graduates. 
Organized alumni influence is also exerted through 
such bodies as the Harvard Board of Overseers 
and the various alumni councils, and almost every- 
where through the alumni secretary, who is coming 
to be a most important person in our collegiate scheme 
of things. As in the case of the influence of individuals, 
this organized or corporate alumni influence is usually 
conservative. We have, to be sure, nothing to com- 
pare with the ante-bellum phenomenon at Oxford and 
Cambridge of the Masters of Arts trooping back to 
kill every scheme of educational reform. Still, when 
the influence of the alumni or of a small group of them 
in an American college is all-controlling, we are not 
likely to see in that institution many signs of intel- 
lectual progress. 

In these days of rapid shifting one very quickly 
gets out of touch, and one is naturally out of sympathy 
with that which he does not understand. Alumni will 
seldom try to learn, education, like politics, being 
something about which every one can, or at any rate 
does, speak with unembarrassed dogmatism. 



230 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The more intelligently run colleges are, however, 
taking great pains to bring proposed educational plans 
clearly and effectively to the attention of alumni, — 
Harvard does this particularly well, — and are suc- 
ceeding in some cases beyond their hopes. The seem- 
ingly absorbing interest of alumni in athletics and 
other side-shows is largely superficial. When their 
minds are prepared they show keen interest in aca- 
demic matters. There are those who say that the 
present President of the United States would be some- 
body else, if Mr. Wilson when President of Princeton 
a decade ago had taken pains to prepare the minds of 
the Princeton alumni more carefully for the considera- 
tion of the "Quad" plan. 

It is significant that the inaugural address of one 
of our most recently elected college presidents, Ernest 
Martin Hopkins, of Dartmouth, should have dealt 
primarily with this question. In it he says: — 

Such strength as the American college lacks, it lacks, in 
the main, because of the too great confinement of interest 
among its men to the college of their undergraduate days. 
Many a man, through lack of opportunity for anything else, 
draws all the inspiration for his enthusiasm for his college 
from his memories of life when an undergraduate, and feeds 
his loyalty solely upon sentimental reverence for the past. 
The misfortune of interest thus confined falls alike upon 
the individual and upon the college. In general, the alumni 
of our American colleges have little knowledge of educa- 
tional movements or college responsibilities on which to 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 231 

base any interest that they may be disposed to give to the 
evolution of college thought. It is needless impoverishment 
for a man to be a recipient of the bounty of his college for 
the brief season of his membership and thereafter to miss 
being a participator in its affairs as a going concern. 

The ability of Dartmouth to continue to justify its exist- 
ence in a large way will be greatly increased or seriously cur- 
tailed by the degree of willingness of the alumni to seek 
knowledge of what the function of this college should be, 
and how its function should be accomplished. Any college 
which could have the really intelligent interest and cooper- 
ation of a large part of its alumni body in working out its 
destiny to major usefulness would become of such striking 
serviceableness as to be beyond comparison. 

An interesting plan, started at Columbia a few years 
ago and now being tried at other institutions also, is to 
bring the graduates back on some selected day when 
the college is in actual operation, when they can visit 
classrooms, hear lectures, and see the students at work 
in laboratories and the like. One important factor of 
this plan is that it gives the alumni from outside a 
chance to keep in touch with the faculty alumni, whose 
position in graduate matters is often difficult. They 
are, perhaps, a little too near the focus, but their spe- 
cial kjiowledge is often discounted, there being Kttle 
realization as yet of the new attitude of intimacy be- 
tween students and teachers. The faculty alumni may, 
through meetings of this kind, and possibly visits of 
outside alumni to classes, be able to teach their breth- 



232 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

ren that it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to tell 
students what to believe. An interesting sign of the 
new spirit is shown at Cornell, where the organized 
alumni recently adopted resolutions looking forward 
to cooperation with the faculty in maintaining schol- 
arly standards. 

The influence of alumni is largely and justly due 
to their extraordinary generosity. Their giving may be 
the result of careful stimulation and may be of a con- 
ventional and imitative type, and perhaps sometimes 
for relatively unnecessary purposes, but it is none the 
less a splendid tribute to what his college means to the 
average ^aduate. Many of the gifts, particularly of 
the younger alumni, represent real sacrifice. Classes 
just out of college all over the coimtry are starting 
schemes for class funds. At Dartmouth, for example, 
the seniors recently adopted a plan which is to add 
fifty thousand dollars to the endowment of the college 
twenty-five years after their graduation. 

Besides these gifts for general purposes, individual 
alunmi will support special things which interested 
them in college or for which they have later developed 
a hobby. Take it all in all, there is nothing else here 
in the world to compare as a social phenomenon with 
the generosity of our American alumni. It is only the 
rarest exception that an alumnus thinks that his gifts 



THE FINISHED PRODUCT 233 

give him any special right to interfere in the running of 
the college. That is more likely to happen in the case 
of non-academic donors. 

Alumni loyalty is a queer complex. Sometimes it 
involves a blind personification of the college as a being 
something like the German State, which by definition 
can do no wrong. Sometimes the devotee has not the 
slightest idea what the college is now really trying to 
accompHsh. Often in such cases the love is really for 
the place rather than for the institution of learning. 
A man is expected to send his son as an auto-da-fe to 
his own college, whether or not it happens to be the 
best place for that particular boy. 

If his college falls off in intellectual prestige, the 
dutiful alumnus will do what he can to provide other 
attractions, and will boost the college none the less 
vigorously, without reflecting that in his daily life he 
would not think of backing a business "proposition" 
without an idea inside it. 

It is easy to find things we might like to have other- 
wise, but alumni loyalty is fundamentally a very fine 
thing. It is nearly always imselfish, and is the most 
generous motive in many a rather narrow-gauge char- 
acter. As to its influence on the college, signs are 
not wanting of an improvement where this is needed. 
Now that the colleges themselves are beginning to 
realize that they have some responsibility as to the 



1234 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

students' sense of values, the alumni are taking more 
interest in non-athletic matters. Indeed, the wave of 
athleticism had probably already passed its crest even 
before the war. Not a few fields which the colleges, 
from oversight or lack of funds, have failed to develop 
are now being taken up by alumni, as, for example, 
the Yale Press and the "Yale Review'* and the De- 
partment of Fine Arts at Harvard. 

In the tradition and the fact of alunrni loyalty, col- 
leges have an engine of terrific power, and we have rea- 
son to hope that, in spite of switches and cut-offs, its 
progress will be on the right track. 



CHAPTER X 
ORGANIZATION 

In this chapter I shall not attempt to describe with 
any completeness the machinery which operates our 
American colleges, but only to outline it in the most 
general way, and so far as possible from the angle of 
the relations of the several parts to the individual stu- 
dent. For any one who cares to go more fully into 
these matters, I should recommend President Eliot's 
book on "University Administration," and that of 
President Sharpless on "The American College," 
both of which give a fair and discriminating picture 
of the college organization and operation. 

Our American colleges are often criticized by visitors 
from abroad for sharing in the natural fault of over- 
elaborate machinery. Probably the criticism is in part 
deserved, but one must always remember that we have 
never given up our original attitude of being in loco 
parentis to the students. Much of our organization 
concerns itseK wholly with questions of personal care 
and some of our best administrative work has been in 
this field. Much of its influence is indirect. The whole 
question of intelligent ventilation and lighting, for ex- 



236 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

ample, has a striking influence on the value of a college 
course, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
was justified in making elaborate preliminary obser- 
vations of the sun's position and elevation throughout 
the academic year at their new site before the archi- 
tect's plans were approved. In institutions where the 
organization is bad, on the other hand, one may profit- 
ably consider the effect upon the intellectual honesty 
of a body of college students that is produced by spe- 
cious college catalogues or other official announce- 
ments. 

The final authority and responsibility in an Ameri- 
can coUege lies in the board of trustees or regents. 
These men are usually not professional educators. In 
the older institutions tfie alumni will always be pre- 
dominant, whether or not provision is made for their 
formal representation on the board. It is the general 
impression that the value of such representation where 
it exists is mainly psychological, because on the whole 
the board is at least as likely to select good men to fill 
the vacancies as is an alumni vote. Many experts be- 
lieve that the only direct relation of the trustees with 
the details of operating the institution should be 
through the president, and certainly the evils of un- 
official short-cuts are beyond question. There is, 
however, a movement toward providing some formal 
opportunity for conference between faculty repre- 



ORGANIZATION 237 

sentatives and trustees' committees. The statutes of 
Cornell, for example, have recently been altered to 
make provision for the election by the faculty at large 
of such a conference committee, and Trinity and other 
colleges are doing likewise. Elsewhere the same 
result is obtained by the arrangement of informal 
conferences between trustees and officers concerned 
during the preparation of the annual budget. 

It is rather the fashion to-day to attack the Ameri- 
can college trustee, and it must be said that some 
individuals have laid themselves open by acts of 
amazing foolishness. But it would be most ungrate- 
ful to forget the devotion and unselfishness with 
which these men, as a whole, have met their re- 
sponsibility. It is no small advantage to have fac- 
ulty and presidential plans checked by intelligent and 
sympathetic men, who are sufficiently removed from 
details to see the problem as a whole, and though 
academic radicals would not agree with me, I see 
no more reason why trustees should be technical 
experts than why good legislators need be jurists. 

There is little question as to the value of their super- 
vision and control of financial and physical matters, 
and in general policies of extension and growth. The 
students of many an institution might profitably be 
brought to realize the relation between their present 
comfortable situation and wide range of opportunity, 



238 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

and certain wise decisions reached by the trustees of 
years before. 

In the old days the trustees used to legislate upon 
the most minute details of discipline and administra- 
tion, but to-day one finds very little of this. There are, 
however, sporadic cases in which they attempt to con- 
trol mores and provide beliefs by enactment. Or, by 
their action as to the appointment, promotion, and 
sometimes dismissal of particular teachers they in 
effect set themselves up as experts in matters of 
scholarship, particularly in the fields of social and 
economic theory. These cases have increased in num- 
ber during the excited and overwrought days since 
August, 1 9 14, and have sometimes been colored and 
confused by questions regarding patriotism. It is 
earnestly to be hoped that during our participation in 
the war their number will, through acts of considera- 
tion on the part of all concerned, be kept just as low as 
possible. There is a sound reason for this. Just now 
our greatest need is national unity, and every such 
case operates in the other direction. Professors and in- 
vestigators in these fields are, from the nature of the 
case, critical of the existing order. Trustees, on the 
other hand, are usually selected because they are 
successful men. Some one has recently taken the 
trouble to look up the occupations of the trustees of 
seventeen endowed colleges and twenty-two state 



ORGANIZATION 239 

universities and found fifty-six per cent in the first and 
sixty-eight per cent in the second to be of the success- 
ful business man type. The list contained out of six 
hundred and forty-nine names no representative of 
labor and only fourteen professors. Generally speak- 
ing successful men are conservative. Wliy should 
they not be? The existing order has worked well for 
them. 

The important thing is, not whether trustees are 
right or wrong in any particular question, or whether a 
radical professor is a detriment to the prosperity of the 
college at the moment, or may even be the cause for 
the turning away of gifts; the real point is whether 
the college is to have a faculty free to follow the truth 
wherever they see it, or whether, in order to be sure of 
their jobs, they will look in only certain safe directions. 
This question is, I need hardly say, one of fundamental 
importance to students. 

The need of tolerance, patience, and self-restraint, 
however, is not all on one side. Academic liberty 
and academic license are not synonymous, and a 
professor when he is dealing in public with debatable 
questions may profitably remember that not only he 
but the institution with which he is connected will 
be judged, not by what he may actually say, but 
by what the newspapers and particularly the head- 
line writers will say that he said. 



240 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The college president of to-day is a far cry from the 
clergyman who used to teach the "Evidences/* and 
administer the complicated system of rewards and 
punishments — chiefly the latter — to the students of 
a century ago; and it is well that he is, for, rightly or 
wrongly, our system of college organization throws a 
load upon the president that only a strong and re- 
sourceful man can bear successfully. In his relations 
with the faculty, on the one hand, and the trustees on 
the other, he must know when to lead, when to drive, 
and when to wait, often the hardest of the three. He 
must do the ornamental things for which the position 
calls without having his head turned by them and 
without wasting a second's unnecessary time. He must 
be in a position to know what is going on in his college 
and in the field of education at large, and must see that 
the college funds are spent as fairly and effectively as 
possible. And he must do all these things without pil- 
ing up for himself a burden of routine duties which will 
keep him from giving his full energies to meeting 
emergencies as they arise. He must learn to bear both 
praise and blame for things for which he is n't in the 
least responsible. He must be a judge of men, both 
to pick new teachers who have their futures before 
them and to get the most out of those already on the 
stajBf. Finally, — and I think most wickedly, — 
faculty and alumni and trustees look to the president 



ORGANIZATION 241 

to get money, — in unrestricted gifts or legislative 
appropriations if possible, — but to get it, anyway, 
even if it must be spent for a useless professorship or 
an expensive and unnecessary building. No wonder 
that the best of them make bad mistakes out of sheer 
worry and fatigue. No wonder some of them degener- 
ate into pompous drum majors who ** slick over" the 
less showy but really fundamental parts of their jobs. 
And no wonder that the students are likely to feel that 
the president is pretty remote from them and their in- 
terests. Often he knows a great deal more about them 
than they realize. A wise president sees to it that he 
meets the worth-while students of each college genera- 
tion, even though he makes no attempt to know the 
whole mass. Provided he keeps his human interest in 
yoimg men, he is likely to be of use to the students just 
in so far as he refrains from doing the obvious things. 
Picturesqueness, by the way, seldom goes with admin- 
istrative efficiency. It was, I think, the picturesque- 
ness of ttie presidents of the older generation, men like 
Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, which gave to the students 
of their time the illusion of close contact with the presi- 
dent. It was not so much that he knew them as that 
they had a vivid external picture of him. 

Another responsibility usually left to the president 
is that of '^advertising the college." Sometimes he 
confuses this with the opportunity to advertise him- 



242 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

self. Sometimes he engages a press agent, although 
this practice is falling into disrepute. Sometimes he 
leaves it to the athletic coaches, merely seeing that the 
faculty is not permitted to interfere by indiscreet 
legislation or administration with the development of 
winning teams. Of course there are legitimate occa- 
sions and methods for bringing pertinent facts about 
any college to the attention of the public, but in 
general the best way to advertise the college is, as has 
been said before, to see that it is good enough to be its 
own advertisement. 

In dealing with academic finance, I must again bear 
in mind that this is a book which concerns the student 
primarily, and I shall refrain from any attempt to do 
justice to the fascinating subject of the pursuit, capture, 
and domestication of donors or such more technical 
questions as the conditional gift and its good and bad 
aspects. It is, however, appropriate to speak of the 
recent tendency toward publicity and clarity in finan- 
cial matters, because intelHgent parents may often 
pursue modern college reports to their advantage, 
bearing in mind that when student fees are the major 
source of income it is practically impossible to main- 
tain academic standards. It is worth while also for 
them to observe how much of the resources of a given 
institution goes into teaching and how much into 



ORGANIZATION 243 

administration and other non-curricular activities. It 
is pertinent also to point out that while much of the 
giving to colleges is still capricious, it is becoming 
more and more true that gifts are made because they 
are deserved and needed, rather than from pure senti- 
mentalism, or for the same reason that the man in the 
parable arose from his bed and made his donation to 
the importunate neighbor. War and war finance are 
sure to reduce gifts of this kind for the future. 

The question of academic fees, needless to say, 
touches the student very closely. Every college col- 
lects them. The State universities began as free insti- 
tutions, and college tuition is still technically free to 
residents of the Commonwealth, but there are labora- 
tory and other incidental fees to be garnered; Wis- 
consin manages to produce a total of $441,000 per 
annum from these sources. 

The cost of college education has been steadily 
rising. For some time after the increase began, the 
whole matter was obscured by complicated and un- 
intelligent bookkeeping, but recurring deficits finally 
removed doubt upon the subject. This increase has 
come "about in part from the extraordinary physical 
developments of the last quarter of a century. Not 
only is science teaching in the laboratories more ef- 
fective than didactic lectures, but it is infinitely more 
expensive. The gymnasia, swimming-pools, luxurious 



244 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

dormitories, and the like are not only costly in the 
initial expense of construction, but in annual mainte- 
nance. 

The rising cost is also due in part to the fact that in 
these days of higher prices for everything, even pro- 
fessors' salaries had to go up in the face of the relatively 
greater ease of making a comfortable living in other 
pursuits (to say nothing of the possibility of getting 
rich). It is n't necessary to meet the financial prizes of 
other callings, for the teacher has rewards that are all 
his own, but the professor, if merely as a matter of 
efficiency, has to be freed from the sordid worry of 
butchers' and bakers' bills. 

As a result of this increased cost, college finance com- 
mittees have been put to it to find wa3^s and means 
of adding to their income. At first this impHed even 
more intense donor-hunting, almost to the point of 
extermination, but at length it occurred to some wise 
man that there was nothing sacred about the tradi- 
tional college fees and that it might be worth while to 
see what the traffic would stand. As a result of this 
new line of thought tuition fees have already gone up 
about twenty-five per cent in the last ten years and the 
movement is still in progress. Professor Hull, of 
Cornell, has proposed a special increase of fifty dollars 
in the fees for students on probation, but this cruel and 
unusual form of punishment has n't, as yet, gone into 



ORGANIZATION 245 

effect. Apparently the traffic stands it, at least so far 
as the stronger institutions are concerned, because the 
very colleges which have made the most drastic 
changes are the ones which are growing most rapidly 
in numbers. This does not mean that the increase 
is easy to meet for the typical college student. As a 
matter of fact the old charges provided problems 
enough, but it does mean, I hope and believe, that 
the conception of a college course as an investment 
is becoming more general, and an investment in which 
the time spent rather than the money is the really 
important factor. 

Of course all colleges make provision for scholarships, 
many by the simple device of writing off the tuition 
charges, a process which obviously puts accurate 
accounting out of the question. Even when proper 
budget provision is made, too many scholarships are 
usually awarded. In many of the colleges they run up 
to thirty and forty per cent of the total attendance, 
and this means a most imf air draft on the fee-paying 
student. 

The whole question of granting scholarships is beset 
with difficulties. What relative weight should be given 
to financial need and what to *' promise of future use- 
fulness." Is the possession, for example, of a dress- 
suit a disqualifying factor? What should be done with 
the pert little grade-getter as against the student of 



246 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

lower standing whom everybody knows is more of a 
man? Which is the better criterion, an **A" won by 
a boy who has the front window qualities to pick up a 
highly paid tutoring job in the smnmer and devote the 
winter comfortably to study, or a ^' C " by the one who 
has to drive a milk wagon to pay his Uving expense? 
Should the conscientious and reasonably capable boy 
who has been encouraged to come by a freshman schol- 
arship be deprived of it as a sophomore merely be- 
cause the cormnittee on awards guessed wrong as to 
his ability? What weight may legitimately be given 
to prowess in student activities, particularly athletics? 
That this factor receives great weight at some institu- 
tions is evident from the naive preliminary shopping 
for the best "proposition," indulged in by many boys 
with schoolboy reputations. Should some alumnus be 
encouraged to carry a boy whom you like personally, 
but whose academic record is, to say the least, 
** sketchy '7 If any of my readers can furnish me with 
the correct answers to these and similar questions, 
what is at present the most difficult and trying of my 
own academic duties will be greatly simplified. 

In addition to scholarships, increasing provision is 
being made for loan funds. The University of Mis- 
souri has recently a bequest of two himdred and fifty 
thousand dollars for this purpose. This is really a more 
logical, as well as a more economical, way to look after 



ORGANIZATION 247 

most of the impecunious students. Scholarships 
should be awarded as they are in England, as prizes, 
and wholly on the basis of striking intellectual promise. 

Some of the present details of fee collection, like so 
many other things about our colleges, are survivals, 
coming down from conditions that have long since 
ceased to exist. The colonial president, for example, 
received honest graft in the form of a pistole for every 
diploma he signed. Consequently there is usually to- 
day a separate diploma fee which, needless to say, the 
president no longer pockets. When flogging went out 
of fashion, the fine, or mulct, became the favorite form 
of punishment, and certain of the present charges are 
essentially pimitive in character. When laboratories 
were a novelty, they were separately financed by a 
system of fees, which still persists, although there is no 
more reason to-day why a student should pay extra 
for his work in the laboratory than for his study of the 
books in the Ubrary. As a result of all this, there is in 
most colleges, in addition to the regular tuition charges, 
a complicated system of what the student designates 
as "chicken-feed fees,^' not so many, perhaps, as at 
old-fashioned Oxford, but enough in all conscience, and 
intensely irritating to the student. The better admin- 
istered colleges are now substituting for these a flat 
fee, corresponding more or less to the dues of a club, as 



248 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

the tuition charges (which are coming pretty generally 
to be based on the number of hours of attendance) 
correspond to the house charges. Even though the 
amoimt of this fee is as great or even greater than the 
total of the incidental fees, the students pay it in a 
wholly different spirit. 

In the colleges where the collection of fees is no- 
toriously slack, and there are many such, the adminis- 
tration takes a serious responsibility for the inculca- 
tion of bad business habits among their students, and 
they also lose a great deal of money. The pockets of 
careless youths are very easily perforated, and every 
fall, hundreds of boys come to our colleges with the 
money for their college fees on their persons, and fritter 
it away before the administration gets around to ask- 
ing for it. Frequently this money cannot be replaced 
and the student has to give up his college course. On 
the other hand, many colleges give far too little dis- 
cretion in meeting exceptional cases to their collection 
officers. As a result many an alumnus goes through life 
with a smouldering sense of injustice which is likely to 
cost the college far more than the original five or ten 
dollars in question. It is not easy to administer a system 
which is at once firm and human, but it can be done. 

I have gone into some detail in these matters -to 
emphasize the principle that whether a student's rela- 



ORGANIZATION 249 

tions with the college organization are satisfactory or 
the reverse depends directly on the efl&ciency and sym- 
pathy with which he is met at the points of most fre- 
quent contact. One would think that the sympathy, 
at any rate, would always be forthcoming in so highly 
competitive a business as catering to students, but 
here again we must not forget the historic background 
provided by the old-fashioned disciplinary attitude 
toward small boys, an attitude to which the student 
naturally reacted by a tradition of disorder, culminat- 
ing frequently in what was really a state of guerrilla 
warfare. As a result of this background the points of 
contact developed themselves almost wholly for the 
purpose of checking and punishing; any policy of help- 
ing, or more particularly, of cooperating with the stu- 
dents being very recent. Not long ago I had occasion 
to go over some voluminous records of administrative 
memoranda of former days, and in not a single in- 
stance did I find any inkling of a desire to work with 
the students for any purpose whatsoever. The salary 
of the porter, for example, was to be paid from fines 
collected, presumably as an incentive to that fimc- 
tionary to catch the students "with the goods." 

It need hardly be said that to-day, in the good 
colleges at any rate, this old point of view has disap- 
peared, and the most earnest desire of those in re- 
sponsible charge is for cooperation with the students. 



2 so THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The inevitable reaction on their part has been an 
aknost complete cessation of disorder. Nevertheless, 
the influence of the old background appears too often 
in the administrative attitude at some of these points 
of contact, in impatience, dogmatism, in a general 
tendency to "deny everything and demand proof." 
It must be admitted that students are often madden- 
ing people to do business with, by their insistence, by 
their surprising ignorance of the most elementary facts, 
and their reluctance to find them in catalogues and 
other material readily available to them. Students 
usually appear only to make work, and it is hard to 
remember that such work is exactly what the adminis- 
trator is there for. The type of attitude I have de- 
scribed tends to persist because it saves trouble for 
everybody concerned, excepting always the student. 
Its most widespread manifestation is the prevalence of 
what I may call the "catalogue mind." It is much 
easier to point to a rule on page 24 than to take a mo- 
ment to explain to a student why a certain rule is pro 
bono publico J to say nothing of considering whether its 
infraction in this particular case would not be serving 
a greater good. 

When the law is laid down not by an officer, but by 
a clerk gloating in his httle brief authority, and quick to 
imitate the tone of his superiors, the situation is at its 
worst. I admit that a student is often just trying it on, 



ORGANIZATION 151 

in pursuance of the Irish policy expressed in the phrase 
"which harm it can't and good it may"; but some- 
times his sense of equity is thoroughly aroused by the 
ruling given and an affront to this sense is not easily 
forgotten. 

At first the president did all the administration that 
was to be done. As things grew more complicated, he 
got the faculty to help him and the college servants 
took on certain routine tasks. At Columbia, for ex- 
ample, the first catalogues were issued by the janitor 
as a private venture. The appointment of academic 
officers other than the president to give their whole 
time to administration is a recent development. I 
know of no case earlier than 1890. 

So far as the students are concerned, the question 
to-day is between administration by faculty committee 
and so-called functional administration, by officers 
appointed and paid ad hoc. In the larger imiversities 
the latter system is becoming firmly established. In 
the separate colleges the former persists pretty gener- 
ally, except that there is usually a dean and a registrar. 
Even at Reed College, which is receiving much atten- 
tion to-day as the pioneer of a new type of American 
college untranuneled by tradition, the recently adopted 
statutes make provision for no fewer than fourteen 
standing faculty committees. My personal feeling as 



252 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

to this matter is very definite. It is not convincing to 
point to the brief period when, under conditions very 
different from those to-day, faculty administration 
worked successfully in the New England colleges and 
perhaps elsewhere. Under present conditions the pro- 
fessor should have his say either directly or upon some 
representative basis upon all matters of constructive 
administration. The three-year study made recently 
by the Oberlin faculty on college efficiency, for exam- 
ple, seems to me a perfectly appropriate enterprise. 
With routine administration, however, he should have 
just as little as possible to do. He has been bred to an- 
other type^ and disregarding the exceptions to which 
attention could be called in any general statement, his 
work of routine administration is badly and expen- 
sively done; badly because it is not the work in which 
he is primarily interested, nor that for which he is 
temperamentally suited, and there is almost sure to 
be unnecessary and harassing delay in getting things 
done; expensively, because its cost must be measured 
not in terms of money, but in terms of contributions to 
scholarship, in teaching, and research which might be 
accompHshed in the time thus employed. It is this 
apparent but fallacious saving in dollars and cents that 
causes administration by faculty committees to persist 
so generally to-day. Still worse is the intrusion into 
faculty meetings of twopenny details depending upon 



ORGANIZATION 153 

the application of principles already determined upon 
by all hands after long consideration, because here the 
time not of one professor or of a small committee, but 
of the whole group, is being wasted. 

Experience has proved that the principle of func- 
tional administration can be adopted even in small 
colleges which cannot afford to pay full salaries both 
to teachers and administrative officers, by the assign- 
ment of versatile professors to do specified adminis- 
trative jobs, giving them time for this work by reliev- 
ing them from some teaching, and charging a proper 
proportion of their stipend to administration in the 
budget. 

One important reason why the old kind of relation- 
ship between student and administration is on the 
wane, and indeed has almost disappeared at the best 
institutions, is because a new type of servant has en- 
tered into academic life, usually a young alumnus, one 
whose interest has been, perhaps, rather in student 
affairs than in the attainment of high grades. Admin- 
istration by men of this kind is supplementing not only 
the operations of faculty committees, but of clerks who 
fail to take responsibility, and imder their influence 
the growing tendency is toward an effective coopera- 
tion, based upon a recognition of the fact that the stu- 
dent is an organic part of the whole enterprise. These 
men know the students and their point of view, and 



254 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

they are anxious to magnify their own Jobs in legiti- 
mate ways. Of course, they make mistakes, mistakes 
usually due to ignorance of faculty, rather than of stu- 
dent, psychology, but they make progress as well. 

The president of one of the large New England col- 
leges tells a story about a young alumnus whom he 
took as his secretary. For about six months the secre- 
tary limited his activities to doing what he was told, in- 
telligently enough, but without comment, and then one 
day he presented to the president a careful memoran- 
dum showing the amount of time which the latter, in a 
given week, had devoted to trivial tasks, and with it an 
estimate of what these activities had cost the college, 
basing the figure upon the annual salary of the presi- 
dent. He then asked whether it would not be worth 
while to try the economy of having the secretary, at 
his salary, do these particular things for the future. 

One element in college administration which has de- 
veloped to an extraordinary degree is that of record* 
keeping, and as this is an element which touches the 
student very closely, the registrar's may be taken as 
an example of the college administrative office. Much 
of the growth in our recording machinery has been 
necessary and inevitable. The elective system, or the 
elaborate substitutes for it which have developed more 
recently, with the separate course as a unit instead of 



ORGANIZATION 255 

the class, necessarily mean more complicated systems 
of record and check than the prescribed course and 
class organization of earlier days. The *' point '* (the 
hour-per-week miit) as the unit of measurement has 
grown out of these new conditions. 

The new college policies which insure individual- 
attention to students mean much extra work for the 
recording officer. Deans, advisors, fraternity chapters, 
all are asking for records, and copies have also to go to 
the students* parents and must be made out for possi- 
ble employers or employment agents, or for professional 
schools. From the nature of the case, therefore, the 
system of records in any modern college cannot be a 
simple one, but it is often made unnecessarily complex 
and dehumanizing in its influence — beautiful blanks 
of all kinds for students to fill out (with the vacant 
spaces invariably too small for the sprawly handwrit- 
ing of American youth), with double and sometimes 
triple sets of records for different officers, a constant 
demand on unstatistically minded professors for sta- 
tistics, and minute instructions, based often upon a 
single case that has gone wrong, finding their way into 
catalogues to make the confusion there worse con- 
founded. 

There is no more hard-working or devoted set of col- 
lege servants than the registrars as a class. Because of 
the strength which comes from accurate knowledge, 



2s6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

the registrar has often a powerful influence on the pol- 
icies of the institution, and fortunately the best men of 
them see the human side of their problem very clearly. 
Where this is not the case, a catalogue-minded registrar 
can often undo the efforts of the professors and of the 
other administrative officers to build up an atmosphere 
of confidence and cordiality on the part of the student 
toward the institution. 

The very titles of other administrative officers who 
are to be found in most well-organized colleges indi- 
cate the care of the institution for all sides of the 
student's activities: health officer, physical educa- 
tion director, chaplain, Y.M.C.A. secretary, resident 
alumni secretary, and the men who under various titles 
look after the dormitories and the restaurants. One of 
the most characteristic is the employment and appoint- 
ment agent, and his work too may be summarized as 
an example. 

Student employment has developed, from a hap- 
hazard permitting of boys to work out their term bills 
by chopping wood or doing other chores, to modern 
offices with a director, stenographers, and card in- 
dexes. The same machinery is ordinarily used for plac- 
ing men after graduation. In the country college 
much of the work, except in the summer, is necessarily 
in connection with the institution, though there are 
agencies for various articles which are sometimes bona 



ORGANIZATION 257 

fide opportunities for work, but perhaps as often a 
vehicle for graft. The experiment of running a farm on 
the Princeton campus, for the purpose of providing 
work for students, was tried in unconscious prophecy of 
the labors of thousands of college boys this year, and a 
very interesting comment and suggestion comes from 
the librarian of the same institution: *'The present 
difficulty," he says, *'is that a very large amount of 
academically trained student labor is employed in such 
unacademic and unskilled tasks as clothes-pressing, 
farming, waiting on table, and other non-literary occu- 
pations which do not contribute to academic education 
or intellectual stimulus and do not require scholarly 
preparation. This is a real economic waste, '* the libra- 
rian states, " and it would be easy to organize useful 
tasks in research, or in the preparation of bibliographi- 
cal aids to research, which would utilize any amount 
of this labor to the advantage of the university and of 
science, and to the intellectual profit of the men them- 
selves." The picture of certain types of our colle- 
giate youth engaged upon bibliographical research is 
a little startling, but the proposal is a most sugges- 
tive one. 

In the cities the opportunities for competent men 
are legion. Students are in demand as subjects for all 
sorts of experiments psychological and dietetic, as 
artistes models, ushers, extra salesmen, as political 



258 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

workers, and j&nally there is the whole range of sum- 
mer opportunities for tutors, hotel clerks, stewards, 
canvassers, in which the country and city college 
stand on even terms. 

Many of the students, as I have already said, find 
their own jobs, leaving the employment ofl&ce to 
look after the less experienced men. There is a good 
deal of confusion in the public and indeed in the aca- 
demic mind about self-supporting students, and this 
is largely due, I think, to the fact that we don't distin- 
guish between the man with regular employment who 
devotes a part of his time to study — as he might to 
religious or social work — and the one whose real busi- 
ness in life for the moment is to be a college student, 
and to whom the earning of money, though more or 
less necessary, is incidental. While the college of the 
municipal type, as at Akron or Cincinnati, may be 
closely concerned with the students' part-time employ- 
ment in industry or city affairs, the average college 
employment office is naturally chiefly concerned with 
the latter type, though it uses the earnings of the 
former to swell the institutional totals. These to- 
tals, by the way, are coming to be very impressive. 
At Columbia, for example, student earnings have 
amounted in the last fifteen years to more than a 
million and a half dollars. 

The employment officer should be in close touch, as 



ORGANIZATION 259 

he too often is n't, with the machinery for scholarships 
and loans, both because he is often the first to know of 
cases where help is sorely needed, and also because he 
learns a good deal about the candidates which does n't 
come out in the classroom. No one has better oppor- 
tunity to spot the ''four-flushers." 

Another sign of the times is the increasing care 
given to the general health of the student body. Some- 
times this is combined with the prescribed work in 
physical education, sometimes there is a separate offi- 
cer. Yale, Columbia, Kansas, and other institutions 
have given particular care to this matter, and the les- 
sons which the war is teaching as to the value to the 
community of a high average of health and vigor will 
help to make the movement universal. The colleges 
which are interested in quality rather than quantity in 
the student body are requiring at entrance not only a 
certificate of moral character, which is a general re- 
quirement, but also a certificate of health. The rela- 
tion between good health and good scholarship is closer 
than is generally realized. 

Let me tell a true story to show the importance of a 
close oversight of student health. A certain student 
who was living alone became more and more depressed 
until finally his melancholia became so acute that he 
carried off a supply of cyanide of potassium from the 



a6o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

laboratory for the purpose of doing away with himself. 
One day he woke up with a sore throat, and as a mat- 
ter of habit went to the college physician for treatment. 
The doctor immediately saw that the boy was suffering 
from acute intestinal poisoning, and prescribed a thor- 
ough house-cleaning and a change of diet. With the 
return of his normal good spirits the boy put back the 
cyanide where it belonged and later on confessed to 
the doctor. 

Academic administration, as we have it, is unknown 
in other countries, and while its complexity is largely 
due to our peculiar conditions, it is true, nevertheless, 
that many colleges are spending more time and energy 
on administration than the conditions warrant, and the 
student pays for this in decreased educational oppor- 
tunities. This, however, is a swing of the pendulum 
which naturally followed the days of administrative 
chaos. The adjustment of these matters must be busi- 
ness-like, but not in terms of cost-accounting, because 
here money is not the proper imit with which to meas- 
ure values. That unit, if it exists, is something more 
intangible and imponderable. For this reason the reor- 
ganizations which the outsiders, chartered account- 
ants, efficiency experts, and the like, have proposed 
from time to time are not likely to work satisfactorily. 
While it is important to know about the progress of 
business-like methods, it is more important to study 



' ORGANIZATION a6i 

the recommendations of experienced men like John 
Dewey or even the briUiant guesses of such a theorist 
as Bertrand Russell. 

The student's first point of contact with the college 
is when he wants to find out something about entrance. 
Here progress has been very rapid. Not so long ago the 
college from which inquirers could expect a prompt 
and intelligent reply to a summer letter could be 
counted on a single hand. I have been told that at 
Columbia, before Mr. Low's reorganization, the sum- 
mer mail was dumped, unopened, into a closet, to 
await the opening of college in the fall. To-day the 
good colleges are pretty competent in this regard. 
Some of them maintain careful mailing hsts, whereby 
prospective candidates are kept informed as to the 
dates of examination, changes in requirements, and 
other facts of importance. 

The indirect relations of the candidate through 
his school have also been much improved. In the old 
days the college blandly ignored the fact that a good 
schoolmaster knows many important things about his 
boys, often more than their parents, and that it is a 
waste of time, to say the least, not to tap this source of 
information, instead of finding out the same things 
empirically all over again. Nowadays the colleges see 
the value of close cooperation in the common task 



262 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of turning boys into men, and even in the examining 
colleges the report of the schoolmaster is given great 
and often deciding weight in the admission of a given 
student. 

One of the basic factors in the future of the college 
as a national institution will be the success of the efforts 
now being made to check the mortality among the 
boys which begins in the upper grades of the elemen- 
tary schools and continues throughout the secondary 
schools. We need the boy of restless mind whose going 
to college is not a matter of social custom or pressure, 
and where we lose him is not between the high school 
and the tmiversity, but before then, sometimes years 
before.. We fool ourselves when we think this is pri- 
marily an economic question. It is really much more a 
question of unsatisfied interest. A boy who is impelled 
to continue his studies by ambition or intellectual 
curiosity can earn nearly as much by odd jobs and 
summer work as he will at a trade. 

Those of our great-grandfathers who went to college 
were tested by oral examinations for admission. The 
president conducted the proceedings, flanked on his 
right by the senior professor of classics and on his left 
by the professor of mathematics. As numbers grew the 
Eastern institutions substituted written examinations 
and the Western State universities, taking advantage 
of a single system of State education, set the example of 



ORGANIZATION 263 

admission by school certificate rather than by exami- 
nation. This system spread rapidly, until to-day the 
colleges which do not accept these certificates are rare 
exceptions; among the large colleges for men only 
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia remain. 
Some few others, while admitting primarily on certifi- 
cate, set one or more examinations for all candidates. 
WilKams, for example, insists upon its own examina- 
tion in English. Harvard, however, and doubtless the 
other examining colleges, have granted certificates of 
admission this year to boys joining the colors. 

Both systems have gone through dismal periods of 
inefficiency. Before th^ establishment of the College 
Entrance Examination Board in 1900, the entrance 
examinations of colleges were carelessly or stupidly 
framed and badly administered, and there was little 
or no imiformity as to requirements. This board, 
which prepares its questions through committees of 
experts representing both colleges and secondary 
schools, soon acted as a standardizing influence even 
on the colleges which continued to offer their own tests. 
It must be admitted that at first its examinations were 
much too difficult, for the very human reason that the 
school-men on the committee were over-careful to 
prove that their scholarly standards were no whit 
lower than those of their collegiate colleagues. To-day, 
however, the examinations provide a very fair test 



264 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of the candidate's capacity to take college work. The 
fact that they are offered simultaneously at centers in 
all parts of the country and even abroad has proved 
a great convenience and economy, and a means of 
bringing many boys from a distance to the stronger in- 
stitutions. It should be imderstood that the board 
simply conducts the examinations and rates the answer 
books, leaving the interpretation of grades, etc., to the 
colleges. Its operations, it must be said, have tended 
to foster rather than to hinder the piecemeal process 
of taking a few examinations at a time, beginning often 
two years before the candidate expects to enter, a proc- 
ess which has grown up to the joy of the private tutor. 
The board, however, now offers comprehensive examin- 
ations as well as tests in separate subjects. By this plan, 
devised and first tried at Harvard (and incidentally 
advertised throughout the land with the dignified effi- 
ciency of which Harvard alone seems capable), the can- 
didate takes only four examinations, each designed to 
test his capacity in some broad general field. He takes 
a single examination in Latin, for example, instead of 
separate tests in Latin grammar, composition, prose, 
Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil, On the basis of these exam- 
inations he is admitted or rejected by the college — 
there are no conditions. This is a very significant step. 
The ends which it aims to reach are obviously most de- 
sirable. Yale and Princeton are adopting the new plan 



ORGANIZATION 265 

with modifications, as are Vassar, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, 
and Wellesley. The action of these last is of particular 
importance, because it must be confessed that many 
of the most important innovations in college education 
in America have been first developed at the girls* 
colleges. 

The certificate system, on the other hand, lays se- 
vere burdens upon the honesty of the good-natured 
school principal. In any calling it is unnatural to "cry 
stinking fish,'* and for a time the colleges were inun- 
dated with boys whose certificates represented just 
about the value of the paper on which they were writ- 
ten. Within the past few years conditions have been 
much improved by a greater severity on the part of 
the certificating colleges themselves, involving of the 
taking-away of the privilege from schools whose stu- 
dents have done imsatisfactory college work; and even 
more by the cooperative action of the various regional 
associations of schools and colleges, and particularly 
by the certificating boards estabhshed by these asso- 
ciations, the New England board being notably effi- 
cient in its work. To-day it takes a good certificate to 
get a boy into a good college. Any certificate will get 
a boy into a bad college, but after all the bad college, 
which has to get students by hook or crook, would 
doubtless admit him, certificate or no. 

No one who knows anything about the subject pre- 



Q.66 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

tends that we have as yet found the best basis of artic- 
ulation between school and college. The examination 
system too often serves as a test of the capacity of the 
''crammer'* rather than of the candidate. The com- 
prehensive examination has not yet been in operation 
long enough to see whether the benumbing influence 
which seems to attack the f ramers of examinations can 
be successfully resisted. If they once become conven- 
tionalized the ** Widow'' Nolan (as the Cambridge 
expert is called) and his fellow-craftsmen will learn how 
to *'beat" them, as they now beat the separate exami- 
nations. Also, in spite of the school record which is 
required of all candidates and scrutinized as a basis for 
permission to take the comprehensive examinations, 
there is danger that the system may result in neglect in 
school of the subjects not to be covered by the examina- 
tion. On the other hand, the certificate system at its best 
is the friend of mediocrity rather than of excellence, 
and decency forbids me to say what it is at its worst. 
It is of the very essence of the new attitude of coop- 
eration between teacher and student, and of the policy 
of substituting for discipline new stimuli based upon 
opportunities for intellectual pleasure, that the admis- 
sion system should keep out the unfit and admit the 
fit, — by the "fit" I mean primarily boys who know 
how to think, — and we all know that as yet neither 
system does this with any degree of uniformity. 



ORGANIZATION 267 

But it IS well for the pessimist to look backward. In 
the twenty-odd years, let us say, since he himself took 
entrance examinations, we have certainly moved far, 
and most of the progress has been in the last decade. 
Then a schoolboy had to know long in advance, not 
only whether he was going to college, but which par- 
ticular system of tests he had to meet. To-day, if we 
exclude a very few institutions which confuse high 
standards with catalogue-minded inelasticity, it is 
true that any boy of good ability who has had a four- 
year high-school course, and many a boy who has had 
to prepare himself, is able to choose among all the col- 
leges in the country. He may have to enter with a load 
of conditions, or as a candidate for some baser degree 
than the time-honored A.B. (a matter which the stu- 
dent will find seems to be regarded as of importance 
only by the registrar), or temporarily as a special stu- 
dent, but he has his chance. This is no doubt due in 
part to our voracious appetite for more students, but it 
reflects also the fruits of hard and careful study on the 
part of administrative officers and the development of 
a much more hirnian and intelHgent attitude. It re- 
flects as well the tendency to substitute expert officers 
of the right temperament for clerical or overworked 
professorial machinery. All this is of particular im- 
portance, because the freshman year is the critical one 
for most undergraduates. Whether or not his college 



a68 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

proves to be a wise investment depends largely upon 
his getting off to a good start, and in this matter an 
intelHgent and sympathetic entrance system shares 
the responsibility with the assignment of first-rate 
teachers to freshman classes and with a wholesome 
student public opinion. 

We are also making progress toward the elimination 
of trivial and irritating entrance conditions. It would 
probably be a mistake to give them up altogether at 
the present stage of the game. The correlation between 
freedom from entrance conditions and success in col- 
lege is not without significance. An inquiry made not 
long ago into the records of four colleges (about sixteen 
hundred cases) showed not a single case of an imder- 
graduate dropped for poor scholarship who had en- 
tered clear of conditions by examination, and the per- 
centage of such students graduating in the first third 
of the class was strikingly high. Conditions, in a word, 
should be the exception and not the rule. 

It is, I think, a good thing that the colleges are not 
rushing too eagerly to adopt the devices for admitting 
students which are being urged upon them by their 
critics. For one thing these counsels are often mutually 
contradictory except as to the immediate need of 
abolishing the present system, root and branch. Even 
along the lines which show most promise, and which, 
by the way, the better-equipped college officers are 



ORGANIZATION 269 

watching closely, the psychological tests of general 
and special capacity, as contrasted with verbal mem- 
ory, it will do no harm to go slowly. Even psycholo- 
gists are prone to go ofif at half-cock, and as a class they 
seem obHvious of the dangers of *' rocking the boat." 
We shall be in a much better position to move forward 
intelligently when we have available the results of the 
careful studies now being made in this general field 
under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation, and 
have had a chance to watch and adapt to our particu- 
lar needs the interesting experiments as to educational 
measurements, by scales and standards, which are 
being tried lower down upon the educational ladder. 



CHAPTER XI 
EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION 

The point of contact between the mechanism of the 
institution and its human membership, often between 
administrative literabiess and common sense, is the 
dean. Until comparatively recent years the president 
was the sole representative of administration, and 
when the separate position was first established the 
dean was usually the senior professor, and his duties, 
which were added to those of his regular teaching, were 
primarily to administer discipline on behalf of the 
faculty. Since that time "the conception of the part 
has changed," as the theatrical people say. If he does 
any teaching, the dean does it incidentally. Most col- 
leges have a single dean, but at Harvard there is an 
assistant dean who gives his whole time to the fresh- 
men, and in several of the State universities there 
is a separate dean of men and another of women, 
who deal with the social affairs of the students, but 
have no direct responsibility as regards their educa- 
tional standards. In institutions like the University 
of Chicago there are a number of collegiate deans, 
each one a teacher in active service, but with duties 
lightened in order that he may look after a definite 



ADMINISTRATION 271 

number of students. There is no particular merit in 
any one of the systems as such. The main point is to 
have the interests and progress of each student under 
the eye of a man who feels a direct responsibility for 
him, and who has the time and inteUigence to exercise 
this responsibility. 

In most colleges the position of the dean is now 
pretty clearly defined, but in some of the smaller ones 
the president still does whatever deaning there is to 
be done, and at Cornell deans may come and deans 
may go, but Davy Hoy, the registrar, runs on forever; 
and for most of the students is the primary representa- 
tive of authority. 

The modem college dean has certain formal duties, 
but woe betide him if he makes them too formal. He 
has his relations with the president and sometimes 
with the trustees, and must, \mder their guidance and 
with the cooperation of the faculty, formulate the 
educational policy of the college. He must know how 
to use the facilities of the institution in the interests of 
the students under his charge. For example, a college 
dean ought to be in close touch with the health officer 
of the institution. I know personally of three cases of 
incipient tuberculosis which were recognized by the 
medical officer in time to prevent serious consequences, 
only because the dean had observed that the boys were 
out of form and had sent them to the doctor for an 



272 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

overhauling. In his relations with the faculty, which 
is often a large and complex body, it is well for the dean 
to have in existence a small executive committee 
elected by their colleagues. At Columbia, furthermore, 
we do much of our important work, not in formal 
faculty meetings, but in a sort of go-as-you-please 
evening gathering at the Faculty Club, where the men 
may smoke if they want to, and where we have the 
benefit of the counsel of the younger instructors, who 
are not members of the formal faculty, but are often 
nearer to the students. 

The dean is still a disciplinary officer, but student 
disorder is disappearing very rapidly and there are 
only comparatively rare cases of ''cribbing" and other 
similar delinquencies to occupy his time. On the other 
hand, it is his duty to approve the programmes of 
each student and to authorize changes in them. This 
ought to mean a very large number of individual con- 
ferences. He should keep in touch with the parents of 
students and the schools from which they come. In 
many colleges the Greek letter fraternities also coop- 
erate with him as to the scholarship of their members. 
It is his painful duty — sometimes on his own initia- 
tive, more often after the case has been considered by 
the faculty, or a committee of it — to sever the rela- 
tions of students found, after a period of probation, to 
be hopelessly deficient in scholarship. Princeton has 



ADMINISTRATION 273 

dropped as many as eighty-one boys at the end of a 
single term. 

The informal duties are really more important. For 
instance, the dean of a city college must make himself 
responsible for seeing that the lonely boys, particularly 
those who are not in residence at the college, get that 
''certain personal touch and influence on their char- 
acters" of which the small colleges make so much. His 
hardest duties in this respect are in providing social 
opportunities for the shy youngsters, who show great 
reluctance to come to one's house and almost complete 
incapacity to leave it when they have once arrived. 
On the other hand, the dean of the country college 
must see that his students get whatever outside stimu- 
lus and touch with outside affairs is possible for them, 
and must do what he can to break up what has been 
called the annual football-poker-baseball trilogy. 

A dean must know something about boys in general, 
and the outstanding facts of youthful psychology. He 
must understand, for instance, their tendency to slump 
from time to time, and how to overlook trivial deKn- 
quencies during such periods. He must know that 
many a boy who will not actually lie sees no harm in 
presenting selected aspects of the truth. A student may 
seem to have no interest in getting an education, but 
he will move heaven and earth to obtain the outward 
evidences thereof in the shape of credits. I know of no 



274 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

more striking examples of youthful ingenuity than 
some of the pleas put forward for an undeserved 
*^ point." 

Then he must be able to decide what is or should be 
the thing which will light up each boy intellectually 
and socially. He must therefore know the dominant 
interest of each, which is often shown by his motive in 
coming to college. He must be able to appreciate not 
merely the boy who starts well prepared and goes 
ahead steadily, but also the boy with poor prepara- 
tion or the one to whom intellectual maturity comes 
slowly, boys who may be problems for the first three 
years and first-rate seniors. And he must look after 
the boys who are off the normal type, a very consider- 
able number in any large college conmiunity. 

The dean must know how to see that the emphasis 
of the institution is placed upon the best boys rather 
than upon those who have a natural capacity for 
getting into administrative trouble, and he must see 
that these best boys have as well-rounded an experi- 
ence as possible while in college. A famous imder- 
graduate dean, now retired, saves his face when one of 
his former students comes up to speak to him and is 
not recognized. He says, ''Well, then, you must have 
been one of the good students, because I remember 
all the bad ones." That would not be a satisfactory 
excuse under present conditions. 



ADMINISTRATION 275 

In dealing with crimes and punishments and in 
particular with the moral failings of students, the 
modern idea of deliberate substitution of some new 
interest to take the place of the deleterious one is 
rapidly taking the place of the old poHcies of repression 
and terrorization. The natural curiosity of man is a 
tremendously powerful instrument, which it is easier 
and more profitable to direct into new channels than to 
attempt to extinguish. 

The qualities which the modem college dean most 
needs are, I should say, the abiUty to retain his faith, 
hope, and charity in the face of a pretty heavy load of 
duties, no one of which seems of any particular im- 
portance, but the aggregate amount of which is very 
considerable. He must learn to face the facts as they 
lie before him — the good quahties and the Hmitations 
of the general college administration, the teaching 
staff, and the student body itself. In a word, he must 
do his job with the material he has at hand and not sit 
back and construct castles in the air as to what he 
could do with the kind of faculty and student body that 
never was on land or sea. He must be able to turn 
away from the dispiriting contemplation of his failures, 
and there will be many such, and get consolation from 
the many men who go forward with credit, and the 
handful who do so with distinction. 



276 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

One of the hardest things for an ambitious man in 
this position to realize is that he cannot do it all him- 
self. No man can supply the atmosphere for a com- 
munity to breathe. He must use what organized 
machinery exists in the way of faculty advisers and 
upper-class counselors (usually known among the 
students, I regret to say, as "nursemaids"), and he 
must be shameless in the use of his friends within and 
without the college in order to see that his boys get 
the particular kind of advice or other help that they 
need. If a man does not unload work of this kind 
successfully he cannot hope to keep himself fresh to do 
his own share of it. College people in general are 
proneto think themselves particularly devoted to their 
duties when they are constantly overworked and tired, 
and for that reason really incompetent to perform 
them. It is both brutal and fatuous to try to deal 
with youth when one's own elasticity has gone, either 
temporarily or permanently. The great secret of suc- 
cess in dealing with young men is to be at the top 
of one's game, otherwise the atmosphere of good 
humor and sympathy, in which alone admonition, and 
usually advice also, can be effectively given, is hope- 
lessly lost. 

The human relationship can be best maintained if 
there is just as little routine as possible, and the ele- 
ment of surprise is cf the greatest value. The wonder- 



ADMINISTRATION 277 

ful hold which Dean Briggs had upon his men was 
due not only to his sympathy and tact, but to a cer- 
tain Haroun-al-Raschid knack of knowing unexpected 
things. Another dean of my acquaintance cured a 
youngster with great intellectual promise, but appar- 
ently an incorrigible *' smart Aleck," by making the 
boy read aloud to him an impertinent essay, regarding 
which one of the boy^s instructors had complained. 

Of course a man in his position needs an instinctive 
sense of fairness. There is one particular kind of fair- 
ness which is also good policy in the long run, and that 
is frankly to advise an unhappy or other "misfit'* 
student to change his college. A man must try to use 
his likes to the advantage of colleagues and students 
without letting his dislikes work to their disadvantage. 
Personally I feel that far too much has been made of 
precedent in our college affairs. There are very few 
real precedents, because the human factors underly- 
ing superficially similar cases may be fmidamentally 
different. It is wrong to think, as some college admin- 
istrations evidently do, that the quality of mercy is 
necessarily a confession of weakness. If each individual 
case is really studied, the rules may go by the board in 
a few of them to the profit of all concerned. 

From the foregoing one might imagine that the dean 
is "the whole show," which is very far from being the 
case. In fact, his statutory authority is usually very 



278 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

slight. Such power as he possesses is based upon the 
confidence of his colleagues, supplemented possibly by 
their indolence. Whether the dean is appointed by the 
trustees or elected by his colleagues makes very little 
difference; whether he is trusted by the latter makes a 
great deal. 

Students and public alike use the word "faculty" 
loosely to include all teachers, but the faculty is really 
a designated body of teachers with the power to vote 
upon college matters. The trustees have a power of 
control over faculty legislation, but they very seldom 
exercise it, and it is fair to say that in a modem college 
the real power lies in the faculty. 

In the old days their duties were mainly judicial in 
character. Miscreants were called before the faculty 
and were solemnly admonished or otherwise punished. 
There was very little educational legislation. Indeed, 
the course of study seemed to be divinely appointed 
and settled for all time. 

To-day in the better colleges disciplinary duties 
have almost wholly disappeared and functional ad- 
ministration has taken over matters like schedule- 
making and examination machinery, which used to 
take the time of the faculty as a whole. The body 
has, therefore, time to devote to legislation regarding 
academic policies and requirements, which it uses 



ADMINISTRATION 279 

sometimes to the advantage of the institution and 
sometimes otherwise. There is great variety through- 
out the country as to the relations of the college 
faculty as such to the appointment of new officers. In 
general they have some say in the matter, but in the 
larger institutions the department, an administrative 
unit composed of all the men in a given field, is likely 
to have the power which comes from initiative. In 
practice this usually means only that the same men 
get what they want accomplished, but in a different 
technical capacity. In the university colleges, how- 
ever, it is really important for the college faculty or its 
representative committee to keep a close watch over 
new appointments; otherwise the graduate professors 
will unload specialists whom they would like to have 
as colleagues for the purpose of rounding out the de- 
partment, but who have neither interest nor skill in 
imdergraduate teaching. The departments, by the 
way, need constant watching or their courses will all 
tend to become merely preparatory for the next higher 
course — which most of the students will never take. 

The great changes in college requirements as to en- 
trance and graduation which have taken place during 
the last twenty-five years have all come about by fac- 
ulty legislation. There has been, as elsewhere in this 
land of ours, a lack of realization as to what legislation 
can do and what it cannot do, there has been a good 



28o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

deal of legislation based upon arguments to the excep- 
tion, and in general there has been over-legislation all 
round. Too much of it represents compromises be- 
tween opposing camps of eloquent theorists, in which, 
moreover, fatigue has not been the least powerful fac- 
tor. On the other hand, it is hard to over-estimate the 
value of the good faculty enactments, or to appraise at 
their full worth the time and devotion, and the sym- 
pathy and interest in the human subjects of the legis- 
lation. 

I have already said something about the require- 
ments for admission to college. As to the requirements 
for promotion and graduation most faculty action has 
been, so to speak, defensive. It has been designed to 
set a line below which the student should not fall, 
either in quantity, quality, or variety of work, based 
upon the value set by the faculty on particular courses 
of study and the performance of individual students 
therein. Fifty years ago there were no doubts, except 
perhaps at Harvard, as to what constituted a course 
of liberal culture. New subjects were let in here and 
there as extras and optional, but the course itself was 
fixed. Then came the fight of these extras (which in- 
cluded all of the modern language work and most of 
that in science, history, and economics) to get breath- 
ing-room. Slowly the vested interests were forced to 



ADMINISTRATION 281 

share their powers. It is a curious thing that when once 
a subject is in, it becomes immediately conservative as 
regards the subjects which are still out. The fight of 
the laboratory sciences for decent recognition in Amer- 
ican colleges and their present attitude of unconscious 
arrogance would form an interesting chapter in the 
history of American education. The sciences, I may 
say in passing, represent a particularly large and 
bulky camel in the collegiate tent because of their in- 
herently heavy load of laboratory hours, which is the 
cause of the chief difficulties which beset the schedule- 
maker. 

Fights as to whether students might omit some par- 
ticular subject have usually resulted temporarily in 
the establishment of some new degree. This has hap- 
pened only very recently at the University of Wiscon- 
sin, where a Ph.B. has been created for the benefit of 
students who desire no foreign language instruction; 
but in general the present tendency is, as I have said, 
toward the restoration of a single undergraduate de- 
gree. 

In the matter of prescribed subjects of study the pen- 
dulum for some years has been swinging away from the 
complete freedom of choice advocated by President 
Eliot and imposed by force of his personality upon the 
college world at large. The feeling to-day is that too 
great freedom results in a scattering of the students' 



282 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

energies, and the devices to check this without going 
back to the old inelasticity of a prescribed course have 
been many. There are various types of groups, majors, 
and sequences, and much legislation designed to insure 
the proper blend of continuity and diversity in college 
work, as, for example, the so-called "much of some and 
some of much" plan devised at Harvard xmder Presi- 
dent Lowell. Much of the impetus for this legislation 
may be traced to a realization, based on the closer per- 
sonal relations between teacher and student, of how 
greatly the background of the typical college student 
has changed, and the number of things with which his 
father was familiar, but of which the average boy 
comes to college hopelessly ignorant. This may be 
shown all too clearly by an allusion to even one of the 
major characters of the Old Testament. It is not alone 
that more boys come to college from homes of poverty, 
but that the motor and other means of spending youth- 
ful time have broken down to an almost equally low 
level, for many of the rich, the old-fashioned foimda- 
tions of common knowledge. 

There is one particularly amusing thing about all 
this legislation designed to steer the undergraduates 
into paths acceptable to the faculty, and its bulk and 
variety the country over are simply enormous. When 
all is said and done the student goes ahead and takes 
what he wants, in so far as the college offers it. He may 



ADMINISTRATION 283 

have to perform a chore or two to satisfy the faculty, 
but in general he gets what he wants. The very com- 
plexity of much of the legislation tends to provide 
numerous loopholes for the ingenious student. The 
degree requirements of Harvard and Princeton and 
Colimibia might have been devised upon separate 
planets, but a recent analysis of the actual programmes 
taken by the students in the three colleges shows 
an extraordinary similarity as to the subjects taken. 
Barring the men who have some strongly dominant 
interest, say in a particular field of science, or those 
who are preparing for some profession demanding the 
mastery of certain tools, as in engineering and medi- 
cine, practically every student will put the major part 
of his time into the group of social and poHtical sciences 
— history, economics, government, sociology — with 
EngKsh and to a less extent other modem literature as 
*' fillers." Any time which the student has left over 
will be devoted to the chance of hearing particular pro- 
fessors whom his friends recommend for divers reasons, 
regardless of the subjects which they may teach. From 
some very careful statistics recently gathered by Presi- 
dent Ferry, when he was dean at Williams, from eight- 
een American colleges, it appears that students the 
coimtry over divide their time as follows : foreign lan- 
guages, 24.5 per cent; English, history, etc., 46.78 per 
cent; sciences, 28.72 per cent. 



284 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

Besides the problem of seeing that the student shall 
take certain subjects because these should be included 
in any liberal education, the faculty is responsible for 
seeing that the student shall not take certain other sub- 
jects, or at any rate shall not receive credit for them 
toward a degree. This is a particularly live problem in 
the university college, where, so to speak, all sorts of 
meat is being offered to vocational and other idols, 
and then left lying around in the sight of undergradu- 
ates. The comment of Dr. E. E. Slosson upon this sub- 
ject may be of interest: "Educators are apt to get 
tangled up in the web of their own spinning and then 
make a big buzzing getting out. The distinction be- 
tween cultural and professional study as drawn is 
largely fallacious. This, of course, can be determined 
not by the nature of the subject nor how it is taught, 
but only by whether the student did or did not use his 
knowledge of it for pecuniary advantage in after life, 
a question which from the nature of the case may not 
be determined until he is dead." 

In the matter of collegiate credit for professional 
studies I have already shown how a line is being drawn 
between the university college, with its combined 
courses, and the separate college. Both types of insti- 
tution, however, have to consider problems relating to 
new subjects not professional in their character, many 
of them strongly urged upon the attention of the col- 



ADMINISTRATION 28 5 

lege by outside influences. What is discreetly called 
"moral prophylaxis" is one example. MiHtary train- 
ing, even before we entered the war, had been brought 
forward by advocates of preparedness, and interna- 
tionalism by its supporters. Then there are the so- 
called "practical" subjects like accounting and sten- 
ography. Another aspect of this general question is 
the pressure brought by various student activities for 
academic recognition. In many colleges a certain 
credit is given for the performance of certain more or 
less intellectual duties in the college world. It usually 
begins with membership on a debating or oratorical 
team, and has extended to editorship of college maga- 
zines and journals, and sometimes to other activities. 
Certain colleges, in recognition of the vitality and im- 
portance of what President Wilson has called the "side 
shows," have also included under the "main tent," 
and usually prescribed, courses in college life. The 
syllabi of such courses as they are offered at Brown and 
Reed are very interesting documents, and throw much 
light upon the growing recognition of the student in 
the college scheme of things. Even where no such 
course is formally offered, the English department is 
likely to base its composition work in part at least 
on material of this type. 

, A second general type of defensive legislation has to 



286 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

do with the standards which the student must meet in 
carrying out the programme approved by the faculty. 
Much has been accomplished in organization to check 
student performance; monthly or mid- term reports of 
progress, announced and unannounced quizzes, better 
machinery for examinations. Lehigh has tried the 
experiment of conducting, at the expense of the insti- 
tution, what is practically its own tutoring school in 
the most devastating subjects, at which attendance is 
invited but not prescribed. 

I am glad to see that the oral examination, which, 
plays so large a part in other countries, but which for 
years has been almost wholly neglected here, is showing 
signs of coming back to its own. The comprehensive 
examination, as opposed to killing off separate parts of 
the subject and promptly forgetting them, is also re- 
ceiving increased attention, as is the matter of requir- 
ing accurate English by students in their work in all 
departments. Besides the repetition of courses in 
which the student has failed, instead of perpetual re- 
examinations, other penalties for poor work have been 
devised; less than the normal credit is given for low 
passing grades and the privilege of taking more *' ad- 
vanced" (and often easier) courses is curtailed either 
by requiring a certain class standing, or, where the class 
organization is breaking down, by prescribing definite 
prerequisites for each separate course. Non-eligibility 



ADMINISTRATION 287 

for student activities is another strong weapon, though 
in this case other factors than the maintenance of aca- 
demic standards are, of course, involved. For flagrant 
cases of neglect or incapacity there are the penalties of 
probation, suspension, and finally dropping from the 
rolls. 

Perhaps the most thorough investigation into under- 
graduate scholarship conditions is the one which was 
recently made at the University of Illinois and it may 
be worth while to summarize the recommendations of 
the committee making it. In the first place, the junior- 
college or imder-class, courses should be actually stud- 
ied and approved by an appropriate faculty committee. 
At present such approval is customarily by a matter of 
form merely. It is also recommended that the regis- 
trar prepare and distribute tables showing the distri- 
bution of grades in the introductory courses. The 
committee also offers some excellent suggestions with 
regard to the improvement of elementary instruction. 
It is interesting to observe that it does not, as some of us 
are inclined to do, dismiss the lecture as an inappropri- 
ate form of presentation. It insists on the importance 
of bringing these younger students, by some means or 
other, into contact with teachers capable of provoking 
real intellectual enthusiasm. 

A sharp distinction is made in the recommendations 
between the lower and the upper half of the four-year 



288 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

course. It is felt that real university methods could be 
applied more largely than at present for the older 
undergraduates and that the controlling principles 
should be the development of intellectual initiative 
and the sense of responsibility for one^s own perform- 
ance. The transition to upper-class standing should 
be marked by something more than the completion of 
a specified number of credits. If some machinery could 
be devised for a real test of such standing, many of 
the problems of student ehgibility would be solved, 
since students lacking such a certificate after two years 
would be ipse facto ineligible. The Committee recog- 
nized the danger of over-development of student activ- 
ities which have evidently reached even greater lengths 
in the state universities than in some of our Eastern 
institutions. On the other hand, the temptation to 
take too heavy programmes is observed, and it is recom- 
mended that no student should take more than fifteen 
semester hours per week, exclusive of physical exercise. 
For some reason there has been, in recent years at 
any rate, very little competent supervision of college 
teaching. "The mere suggestion of such a thing,'* as 
Professor Seis has said, *'will be considered heresy by 
many, but no one familiar both with college teaching 
and with the effects of skillful supervision of teaching 
in elementary and secondary schools can doubt the 
potential efficacy of supervision in the college. Super- 



ADMINISTRATION 289 

vision of instruction is distinct from administration. 
The college administrator is found everywhere, but 
the supervisor nowhere." 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has 
recently appointed an educational expert to study the 
methods of undergraduate teaching, and, as chairman 
of a faculty committee, to recommend improvements 
as they are needed in this field. The experiment should 
be watched with interest by other institutions. The 
educational survey, undertaken upon invitation by im- 
partial outsiders, has already become more or less the 
fashion in school systems and there have been four or 
five examples of surveys of higher institutions. The 
process runs coimter to all the sufiicient-unto-ourself 
traditions of our colleges, but, carefully and sympa- 
thetically conducted by competent men, there can be 
no question as to its value, and I look forward to see 
not a few of those surveys during the coming decade. 

The actual effectiveness of all faculty legislation de- 
pends, of course, most of all on the general quaHty and 
moral fiber of the college administration. In many 
cases rules rapidly become a dead letter, either through 
a willingness on the part of the faculty after adopting 
drastic legislation to *' reconsider'^ practically every 
actual case, or by an accommodating blindness as to 
how its regulations are actually administered by the 
dean or registrar. In general, however, there has been 



290 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

a great improvement all along the line, and the mini- 
mum requirements for a college degree are far severer 
than they were fifteen or twenty years ago. 

The college machinery and its traditions of caution 
and precedence have been broken rudely by the out- 
break of war and the necessity for a host of rapid 
decisions, not in the interest of the college and its re- 
vered standards, but of the national welfare. In gen- 
eral the colleges have stood the test better than their 
critics might have expected, their legislation having 
been in the main sound and sensible, and, what is most 
surprising of all, prompt. On the other hand, the bet- 
ter managed colleges have realized that you can't put 
knowledge into a boy's head merely by sa3dng that it is 
there, and in the progressive subjects like mathematics 
the students, when they are ready to resume their col- 
lege duties, will find make-up classes ready for them as 
a preparation for the more advanced work. 

Thus far all the faculty activities I have described 
have been defensive in character. The faculty has 
another function to which nowadays it is fortimately 
giving more and more attention, i.e., the placing of 
emphasis on excellence, upon increasing the intellec- 
tual opportunities within the college course, and get- 
ting students of ability to take advantage of them. We 
lack in America the constant stimulus to make a stu- 



ADMINISTRATION 291 

dent do his best which comes from the social and finan- 
cial prizes open in Europe only to men with high rec- 
ords as students. It is typical that with us an employer 
very seldom asks whether an alumnus whom he is con- 
sidering for appointment was a high-stand man, and 
that when the information is volunteered this is not 
always to the benefit of the candidate. 

In the field of scholarship the element of rivalry, so 
strong a factor in the outdoor life of the very same boys, 
plays a small part for the great mass of students, in- 
cluding many of the ablest. The prizes which are open 
to them, some of them of considerable money value, 
draw out surprisingly few candidates, and the winning 
of them too often attracts Httle attention. 

To some college faculties the thought has come that 
the fault lies not wholly with the students, that the 
latter put a low estimate, not upon intellectual ability, 
but upon the capacity of the faculty to test and recog- 
nize and reward it. Much of present legislation in the 
more progressive colleges, those where personal inter- 
est and attention to the individual student is a strong 
factor, has been colored by this new point of view. 

One general type of change has been in the clearing 
of the decks for the rapid worker. This, I should say in 
passing, does not result in too brief an exposure to 
academic influences, since nearly all the students who 
take advantage of legislation of this type are profes- 



292 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

sionally minded and continue their formal education 
for two or more years after graduation from college. 
In most colleges the student, at the beginning of each 
year, orders (and pays) a la carte, i.e., by the separate 
course. He is graduated when he has completed the 
requisite number of units, at commencement, or at 
mid-year, or at the end of a summer session. Of course 
the amount which a student may take has to be lim- 
ited, for the capacity of boys of a certain type, when 
unwatched, to amass credits, is almost unbelievable. I 
know of one junior, — it was in the dark ages about 
1900, to be sure, — who, by juggling his programme in 
the fall, registered for enough courses in which no roll 
was called (several of them were conducted simul- 
taneously) to get credit for thirty hours a week, and 
thereby catch up with his classmates, who had forged 
a full year ahead of him during his freshman and 
sophomore years. The tendency to let boys of more 
serious purpose take heavy schedules, in spite of the 
present checks put upon them, has gone a httle too far, 
because it has resulted in a general lessening of the 
demands in each separate course, but on the whole the 
influence has been salutary. 

Then there is the whole new machinery for credit 
for additional entrance subjects, for taking work in 
summer sessions, or, as at Chicago, during four terms 
per annum. In many colleges the fundamental courses 



Hi 



ADMINISTRATION 293 

are so arranged that a boy may enter in February as 
profitably as in September, and this often saves an 
entire year for a capable student. The plan now in 
general vogue for assigning extra credit for consist- 
ently high grades, with a natural obverse of penalties 
for low grades, was invented, it is good for us compla- 
cent Easterners to recall, at the University of North 
Dakota. 

It must be confessed that all these devices have the 
disadvantage of producing, as a sort of by-product, a 
type of student who seems to beUeve that to become a 
scholar and a gentleman all one has to do is to accu- 
mulate a certain number of ''points " ; but in my judg- 
ment the freedom which they give to the really able and 
worth-while man more than outweighs this unfortu- 
nate tendency, which, after all, can be largely checked 
as it arises, by frank advice to the student who appears 
to be threatened with a false sense of values. 

Besides introducing elasticity in the general ma- 
chinery, certain college faculties (and their number is 
increasing) have estabHshed a special degree with 
honors, usually more or less on the Oxford plan with 
modifications to meet American conditions. The 
Columbia scheme, with which I am naturally more 
familiar, was estabHshed in 19 10. With us the em- 
phasis is placed primarily on the student's own work 



294 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

and particularly his general reading outside the class- 
room, and is tested by a searching oral examination 
covering three years of work in his two fields of special 
study. The details of organization at different places 
vary and, indeed, the whole movement is still in the 
experimental stage. The characteristic thing about it is 
that the college recognizes that it has some students, at 
least, toward whom the defensive attitude is not nec- 
essary, for whom the red tape which encircles his fellow- 
students may be cut, and for whom even the routine 
of class instruction may largely be broken down. In 
the colleges which have established honor degrees a 
gratifying number of students have been found who 
may be counted upon to work under their own steam, 
not from fear of penalty, but from pleasure in the job. 
It must be admitted that the stimulus of recognition 
by their fellows is not as yet a potent factor as it is at 
Oxford and Cambridge, but this may come with time. 
This whole movement is a very significant one, and I, 
personally, have great hopes for it, but its friends must 
be constantly upon the alert or it will tend to become 
conventionalized and arid, and, as a result, fail to 
accomplish its purpose. Upon the situation at Oxford 
I received involuntarily the following light from over- 
hearing a conversation in the smoking compartment of 
a trans-Atlantic steamer some years ago. A Cambridge 
man was bemoanmg the reforms recently adopted 



ADMINISTRATION 295 

there, which had operated to take much of the joy out 
of life for the pass-men, and his Oxford companion told 
him that the same kind of thing had been put through 
at Oxford, but that he had been warned in time, and 
had gone in for what he called a rotten honors degree. 
As soon as his dons discovered that he had no ambition 
to make a first or a second class, they had left him to 
his own devices, and he had had a lovely time and in 
due time had been presented with a fourth (honors) 
class, " to get him off the books." 

Besides making this special provision for the man 
who is willing to be singled out as a candidate for 
academic recognition, much has been done (although 
much more still remains to do) to develop a sense of 
respect for the ability of the college to recognize the 
ability of any student. Faculty committees carefully 
check examination question papers and deal patiently 
with the misguided authors of a certain type, as, for 
example, the man who in the "correct" answer to an 
algebra paper has a boat sailing at the rate of two 
hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. Similarly, 
curves are plotted to show a man how much higher he 
is marking than his fellows, or, in other words, how 
many chronic loafers he is attracting to his classroom. 
Attempts are made to check the constant tendency for 
courses to overlap in subject-matter, a tendency which 



296 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

astute students use as a basis for materially reducing 
their load of outside preparation. The details of com- 
petition for prizes are, as a rule, much more intelligent 
than they were a few years ago. 

Plans for rewarding high quality and penalizing low 
quality have gone faster than plans for accurate de- 
termination of quality. College grading is now nearly 
everywhere a purely personal matter. In many places 
this is recognized, and methods are being sought for 
standardizing grading without offending the offending 
professors, who are usually, but not always, the elder 
statesmen of the faculty. The new methods of grading 
are based on the ^^ normal probability curve," whereby 
about one half the grades given in any class would be 
C, with B and D each having about twenty per cent, 
and A and E each about five. As soon as faculties can 
be educated up to it some such system whereby a 
student's grade is based primarily on his relative 
standing in the class, rather than on the varying stand- 
ards of teachers of varying ideals and temperament, is 
sure to be adopted. The plan at Missouri University 
was first adopted and is best known. An interesting 
variant is that at the University of Nevada, which 
provides a correction factor based on the grading hab- 
its of each professor. Changes along these lines will 
probably not be rapid, however, and should obviously 
be accompanied by changed methods in determining 



ADMINISTRATION 297 

college honors, as, for example, election to Phi Beta 
Kappa. 

Of course in the whole movement toward better 
standards formal action by the faculty is of little worth 
unless it is supplemented by careful personal work on 
the part of deans and individual professors. If the 
average student is to get the most out of his college 
course, either the dean or some other adviser must see 
to it that it is properly coordinated, a task which in the 
English universities is the function of the "Chootor," 
as he is pronounced, whose nearest relation in this 
country was the preceptor in the days of Woodrow 
Wilson at Princeton. 

A friend of mine, now a distinguished professor of 
philosophy, would probably have been one of life's 
failures if one of his teachers had not taken the trouble 
to tell him in just the right way that he was throwing 
away real talent for scholarship by a devotion to beer 
and skittles; and to many an able man Dean Briggs 
found the chance to say the one thing which could 
awaken a sense of intellectual pride. 

The most important factor of all is, of course, the 
matter and manner of teaching in the college, and it 
must be confessed that no machinery, faculty or other,' 
has as yet been devised which can insure a programme 
consisting of well-balanced courses, not in water-tight 



298 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

packages but articulating properly with one another, 
and making progressively greater demands upon the 
thinking capacity of students. After each long and 
painful process of rearrangement, such as takes place 
every few years in every college, the student can 
usually say: "Well, I don't see that they've really done 
anything. The prescribed courses are still nothing but 
chores and the electives are most of them snaps." 
And the chance of getting really good teachers for im- 
dergraduates or even the best teachers the institution 
can afford, seems equally discouraging. Here again, 
however, the thing to do is not to brood too constantly 
upon the troubles of the present, but to look back a 
few years and see what has been accomplished in the 
interval. Imperfect as conditions are now, they are 
far better than they were, and it perhaps is just as well 
for us to feel that there will be no harm in leaving some 
things to keep our successors busy. 



CHAPTER XII 
TEACHING AND TEACHERS 

I HAVE tried to point out the distinction between the 
professor as a member of a legislative or judicial body, 
and the individual teacher as he meets his students in 
the classroom. What I have to say now has to do with 
him in the latter capacity. 

Ask any cartoonist to draw a picture of a college 
professor, or ask the man in the street to describe one, 
and you will get results that will be practically uniform. 
The college professor haS become a type like the stage 
Irishman. He seems never less than eighty years old; 
he lives in cap and gown; he usually wears octagonal 
glasses; and he answers to the name of Dr. Dryasdust. 
As a matter of fact, college professors as a class furnish 
to-day about as accurate a cross-section of the popula- 
tion as can be furnished by any calling. They are men 
from all sorts of backgrounds, of every age and type 
and quality of ability, with ideals running from the 
lowest to the highest. The original of the conventional 
picture, in so far as it had one, was the professor in 
service a half-century or more ago. Although there 
were always striking exceptions, the men of this time 
were pretty remote from what was going on in our 



300 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

pioneer development. They were usually clergymen 
who had turned to teaching because their interests 
seemed philosophical rather than pastoral. As science 
and modern Hterature forced their way into the college 
curriculum, however, engineers, men from government 
bureaus, journalists, and men of letters were drawn 
into the caUing, and so were also the men who had 
returned from university studies in Germany. To-day 
instead of isolation, it is really becoming hard to secure 
from the successful professor enough of his time to 
make sure of efficient teaching. Even in a supposedly 
theoretical subject like the dismal science, our econ- 
omists are spending more and more time upon state 
and federal commissions of various kinds. 

With the development of new subjects and the growth 
of new colleges the total of college teachers has become 
great enough to form a pretty significant class in the 
community; it is a group, however, that has as yet but 
little class consciousness, although there has recently 
been formed an Association of American Professors. 
Practically all professors of to-day have been specially 
trained, although it may be pointed out that the train- 
ing is mainly in the acquisition of learning and very 
little in the art of teaching. This is typical of a strange 
lack of a recognition of the place of the college teacher 
in the profession of teaching as a whole; a symptom 
also displayed in an attitude of superiority toward 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 301 

secondary-school teachers very seldom justified by the 
facts. 



The economic status of the group is not so hopeless 
as might be supposed from the wails which rise from 
disgruntled members. Salaries are low, it is true, too 
low, but they are rising, and a professor can usually 
supplement his stipend by outside work not too remote 
from his intellectual interests. 

They have the advantage of a pretty definite secu- 
rity of tenure. The price which the community pays for 
this in the retention of hopelessly incompetent teachers 
is, of course, a heavy one, but an intelligent admin- 
istration can keep it down as far as possible by par- 
ticular care in junior appointments in the same field. 

The actual load of teaching, formerly far too heavy, 
has already been reduced in the stronger institutions 
and is beginning to come down in the others. If a man 
really wants to do productive scholarly work, he gets 
the chance to do it. I know this is contrary to the 
general impression, but this impression is sometimes 
the result of publicly indicting a soulless administra- 
tion for the plaintiff's failure to do at fifty what he was 
able to accomplish at twenty-five, when the fires of 
enthusiasm were burning brightly. 

If the daily routine during term time is wearing, the 
professor can count on a considerably longer vacation 



302 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

than the average, and the researches of those engaged 
in making pension provision for him (another asset) 
show that his life is likely to be considerably longer 
than that of men in other callings. 

In spite of exceptions here and there, intellectual 
freedom is pretty well established. Certainly this is so 
in the stronger colleges, where a man can be as radical 
as he pleases within the bounds of intellectual fairness 
in presenting both sides of questions upon which there 
is a difference of opinion among trained men. When 
trouble arises it is much more likely to be a matter of 
tact than of belief on the part of the professor, although 
it is only fair to admit that errors of tact are more 
likely to be expensive to the professor whose views on 
social and political relations are disturbing to those 
about him. Even so watchful a critic as Professor Jas- 
trow, of Wisconsin, bears witness to how generally the 
legal authority of governing boards in matters of ten- 
ure has been "most wholesomely exercised by a judi- 
cious neglect." The recent increase of cases of conflict 
between trustees and teachers reflects, I think, the 
overstrained nerves of war-times rather than any per- 
manent change for the worse in their relations. It was, 
by the way, an Englishman imder far greater strain 
who recently pointed out in Parliament the profoimd 
truth that an anxious and depressed teacher is bad; 
that a bitter teacher is a social danger. 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 303 

At a recent college reunion a professor is quoted as 
having said to a classmate who is a bank president: 
"Well, John, you may have a Rolls Royce or two and 
a place at Newport, but I have a Ford and a farm in 
Vermont and more time to enjoy them. Besides, I am 
a much freer man, and living my Uf e with young people 
is keeping me young too. No, I would n't swap with 
you/' 

Unfortunately too many American professors are 
too much worried by living on a close margin to enjoy 
life as much as their hypothetical colleague. Even 
more imfortunately, too few of the best all-round un- 
dergraduates in any college realize that there are pro- 
fessors who would n't swap with a bank president, 
however clearly they may come to realize the good 
points of the calling when it is too late for them to enter 
it. It is an interesting fact that much of the best ma- 
terial in our college faculties to-day comes from Canada 
and from the Southern States, regions with good cul- 
tural backgroimds, but with relatively less tempta- 
tion at the time these men graduated, at any rate, 
from the gods of maromon. 

The supply of teachers that is now coming from the 
large cities and from the more prosperous parts of the 
country is likely to contain a certain amount of second- 
grade material. The graduate schools of the country. 



304 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

by scholarships and other subsidies, provide a powerful 
stimulus toward entering upon the Ph.D. path which 
is the normal route to college teaching. At one state 
university it was found that fifteen out of every seven- 
teen students in the graduate college were subsidized in 
one way or another. This state of things makes a dan- 
gerous appeal to students to whom the social position, 
security, and privileges of the professor are already 
temptations. 

The relation between the degree of Ph.D and under- 
graduate teaching is an interesting one. When the first 
doctors came back from Germany seventy-five years 
ago, they went to the colleges as the only market for 
their wares, and they were most valuable, not prima- 
rily because of the training they had received, although 
this was important, but from the fact that they were 
men with initiative enough to go abroad at all. In 
a word, they constituted a highly ** selected" group 
of intellectual pioneers. Then came our own pro- 
duction of Ph.D.'s, closely copied from the German 
model. 

The industry began modestly enough. Even as late 
as 1884 the annual output, which is now something 
over six himdred, was only twenty-eight. These early 
American doctors, notably the group produced at 
Johns Hopkins, were also picked stock, and they also 
went into imdergraduate teaching — there was as yet 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 305 

no market for graduate teachers. From the almost 
uniform success of all these men, a confusion arose 
between the merit of the men who have received the 
degree and the merit of the degree in Itself as a guar- 
anty of good college teaching. When the Ph.D. octo- 
pus, as William James called it, was most powerful, 
many a man was appointed to a college position just 
because he had a Ph.D., and many tmsuccessful pro- 
fessors, long past the age when the training would do 
them any good, went bravely through the drill and 
wrote their dissertations and in due time became doc- 
tors themselves. The surprising thing is not that so 
many utter failures hold Ph.D.'s, but that so many 
of them have made good. We must remember that 
whether or not the doctorate furnishes the best prepa- 
ration for a chair in a Continental imiversity , the duties 
of a collegiate professor in America are very different. 
We have seen that the students are younger, that their 
preparation is more irregular, and above all that we 
accept a parental responsibility which is unthought of 
in Europe. 

For a while things were pretty bad, and this I am 
sure has had its effect upon the reluctance of the lead- 
ers in the undergraduate world to go into college teach- 
ing. These boys felt, and I venture to put the feeling 
into their own language, "Even if this Ph.D. business 
did n't make a dub out of a fellow, you would n't want 



3o6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

to have to associate with a lot of other dubs for the rest 
of your life." 

With all its "outs" the whole movement did serve 
to bring about a realization that learning is a living and 
growing thing, a realization that was wholly lacking in 
eariy days, and to-day the "outs" are becoming less 
important. For one thing intelligent presidents and 
others charged with the responsibiHty of selecting 
teachers are coming to look to see what kind of a man 
is inside the scholar's gown and are not afraid to choose 
a good man in the bachelor's serge instead of a second- 
rater in the doctor's silk. Some few even ask the can- 
didate whether he has taken the chance to learn 
something of the science and art of teaching while in 
the imiversity, and a very few call men to college posi- 
tions who have proved their competence in secondary 
schools, entirely regardless of pedigree. 

On the other hand, new means of livelihood, some of 
them far more lucrative, are developing for possessors 
of the doctor's degree — in research institutions, gov- 
ernment bureaus and commissions, and in business and 
banking houses. As a result it is to-day true in most 
fields of scholarship that the man who goes into teach- 
ing does so because he wants to, and not because he 
would otherwise go hungry. 

In most cases there is no contradiction at all between 
productive scholarship and good teaching; for the pro- 



.u 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 307 

ductive scholar is usually a good teacher, because he 
has mastered his subject or, rather, is mastered by it 
and is excited by the opportunity to present it even to 
beginners. A student of Carl Ludwig has said that in 
the forty-seventh time Ludwig offered a certain course, 
he never saw him enter the classroom without chang- 
ing color. Unfortunately, however, it came to be the 
thing, say twenty years ago, to base promotions and 
invitations to professorships on scholarly production, 
I think largely because it is easier to measure than 
teaching. As a result there was, particularly in the 
universities, a great outbreak of pseudo-research and 
an even more general neglect of teaching, but we are 
to-day coming to the realization of two things. There 
is, in the first place, a type of excellent teacher who 
keeps up with his subject, but who does not happen to 
have the particular combination of qualities that are 
requisite for important contributions to knowledge, 
just as there are great pianists and violinists who don't 
happen to be composers also. This type of man was 
formerly neglected in promotions and other forms of 
academic recognition, but he is now coming into his 
own,- which is a matter of particular importance in its 
effect on the young men in the service. 

In the second place, it is becoming recognized that 
there is a field for productive scholarship within the 
college activities themselves. Faculties in their volu- 



3o8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

minous deliberations are prone to give greater atten- 
tion to the logical development of their arguments than 
to the accuracy of the premises, and there is as real 
scholarship in digging out and assorting the essential 
facts of college affairs as there is in the classifying of 
trilobites. One of my colleagues at Columbia has no 
Ph.D., but he deserves it ten times over for his ability 
to see the need of attacking some particular collegiate 
problem, to amass his material from registrars^ records, 
etc., and finally to demonstrate the baseness of the 
metal in some dogma which for generations has served 
as coin of the educational realm. 

While the security of tenure lulls some professors 
into slumber, most of them give the best that they 
have. The stimulus varies. Sometimes it is a real 
scholarly flair. Sometimes it is an ambition to be 
prominent in the councils of the institution, an incen- 
tive which usually leads away from the student to orna- 
mental positions of various kinds. The newspapers 
are particularly prone to back the wrong horses in 
college faculties. I once saw in a Sunday supplement 
a page devoted to the portraits of six leaders of educa- 
tional thought, of whom three were fakers, two were 
men of very mediocre attainments, and only one was 
in any sense a leader. 

A strong incentive to a teacher is a desire for popu- 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 309 

larity with the students, particularly as compared with 
the other men in his particular subject or of his gener- 
ation. This is usually a good motive. It leads to keep- 
ing up with the subject, to the organization of teaching 
material, and often to the development of intimacies 
with the students. Of course the stimulus is not good 
when it involves playing to the gallery in pyro- 
technic lectures, easy tasks, and high grades. It some- 
times leads to an attitude of siding with the student 
against the administration and even to more or less 
veiled criticism of colleagues. But these manifesta- 
tions, so far as my experience goes, are rare. 

As a matter of fact, the students themselves are 
pretty good judges in their selection of teachers. The 
underground railway or camorra which exists in every 
American college is hard to describe, but its activities 
are readily recognized. It is easy to compare, for ex- 
ample, the relative weight of the official pamphlets of 
advice to students, or the speeches of the dean, as com- 
pared with the pronouncements of some Solon of the 
fraternity house or training-table. The college student 
usually selects subjects rather than teachers, but when 
a choice lies between two different teachers his selec- 
tions, when based on the counsel of these unofficial 
advisers, are usually intelligent. Of course the students 
get fooled sometimes. In particular they often fail to 
find out until too late who are the really great men 



3IO THE UNDERGRADUATE 

under whom they have the chance of studying. This is 
more particularly true of the universities than of the 
separate colleges. There should be some recognized 
way of advertising the intellectual leaders, in the cat- 
alogue, along with the new swimming-pool and the 
tennis-courts. It would really be quite as legitimate. 

The students' judgments are, often, I think, shrewder 
than those of a teacher's colleagues. They recognize 
the artistic quaHties of a teacher when he is fortunate 
enough to possess them. The Ph.D. does n't count for 
much. Its possession by a young instructor is some- 
times regarded as an asset by the *^Sons of Rest," be- 
cause it furnishes a tip as to the specialty of the teacher, 
to be played up judiciously as opportunity offers. 
The professor who sits on the side lines to be seen of 
men and noti)ecause he knows or loves the game is very 
soon detected, as is the one who makes his fraternity 
membership an opportunity to make speeches rather 
than to know and understand the boys. A man whose 
grades are chronically high may be "elected" by an 
athlete who wants to stay eligible, but this is really 
done with reluctance. 

It is interesting to note that students in their selec- 
tions pay little attention to the age of their teachers. 
One usually regards a college faculty as an old body, 
not with white whiskers, like the conventional cartoon, 
perhaps, but at least middle-aged. As a matter of fact 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 311 

the average age of the teachers on permanent appoint- 
ment in the colleges in the Hst of the Carnegie Foun- 
dation is forty. This is an inevitable result of the 
tendency to split courses into sections to insure indi- 
vidual instruction. What is usually regarded as a 
choice between the lecture system and the quiz sys- 
tem is really a choice between big classes and older 
teachers or small classes and younger teachers. At 
the University of Illinois, for example, there are sixty 
sections of freshman English and naturally most 
of them must be met by instructors. This tendency 
*' to expose our college boys to untried youths '* is often 
deplored, notably in colleges which can't get good 
young teachers to go to them, but if I were a college 
student in a college where junior appointments were 
made with care, I should rather have the majority of 
my teachers below thirty-five than above. Of course 
there is a great variability among the younger men, 
and in large colleges it is the business of the dean to see 
that each student gets a fair assortment of "section- 
hands," as they are called. These younger men have 
their futures before them, their standards are nearly 
always high, and when they make mistakes, as they do, 
they are likely to profit by them. Of course, I am 
assuming the presence of older men in the group to 
stimulate and to steady the whole. The ideal man is 
one whose youth is not a matter of years, but of the 



312 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

inner spirit. Too often the years bring a desire for 
recognition of service accomplished, through title and 
office, in place of the earlier desire for an opportunity 
to get things done just because they are worth doing. 
The men who are betes noires to the students usually 
deserve it, — not always, sometimes an excellent man 
suffers from some imf ortimate trick of manner, — but 
the impopular professor usually has in his composition 
something of the sneak or the bully, or in some way 
he doesn't play fair. Students don't mind hard 
masters. I know one highly esteemed professor who 
frankly tells his classes that his interest is only in the 
topmost tenth and that he proposes each year to set 
his pace according to the ability of that group. On the 
other hand, students will flee from dullness whenever 
they possibly can, which is indeed natural, in view of 
their helpless position on the benches when once en- 
rolled for the course. Sometimes as a result they miss 
a big man who is dull, but big men are very seldom 
duU. 

Professor Rapeer, of the Pennsylvania State Col- 
lege, recently questioned some of his upper-class-men 
as to what constitutes a good college teacher, and to 
show how much to the point in our present discus- 
sion is the student judgment, I venture to quote some 
of the thirty-nine points from the published summary. 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 313 

Each student had had experience with about forty in- 
structors: — 

He has a sense of humor and a spirit of genuine good na- 
ture — a spirit of joyful strenuous endeavor. His jokes, if 
any are used, are not stereotyped chestnuts used for each 
succeeding class, but they grow naturally out of his spirit 
of good will in class work. . . . 

He keeps students constantly on the alert, expecting at 
any moment to be called on or to be held responsible for an 
understanding of the subject-matter that is being taught. 
There is no asking of questions alphabetically or according 
to number in his classroom. He has a large majority of 
the students vigorously engaged most of the time. 

He gives evidence of making careful daily plans for his 
lessons. . . . Preparation is noticed in the command of 
subject-matter, in the quality of questions asked in the 
class, in the organization of the lessons, in the connections 
made with current affairs, and in the type of illustrations 
used. 

He shows pupils at the beginning of a term the impor- 
tance of the work which they are to do during the term. He 
makes them feel that in his course they have a great oppor- 
tunity to do something and contribute something which is 
fundamentally worth while. They start the term's work 
right. 

He uses his examination periods for reviewing, organizing, 
and helping the students to use and apply subject-matter, 
skill, and ideals gained in his course. Such examinations 
are not a waste of time. . . . Generally he hands examina- 
tion papers back early and goes over the questions with the 
students in class and frequently with individual students in 
private. He teaches the students how to write their an- 
swers distinctly and to the point. 



314 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The college has for some years recognized that it has 
its particular problems, but it is only just beginning to 
develop its own particular pedagogy » How far we have 
to go is shown by the earnest but illogical attempts 
at the University of Washington and elsewhere to 
organize college classes on *'How to Study," The 
relative value of talking to students and talking with 
them is, however, coming to be recognized, and to-day 
it is slaying a dead, or at least a dying, giant to cry out 
against the undiluted lecture system as a method of 
exercising what Professor Bentley alluringly calls the 
*'rare privilege of successfully pitting an eager mind 
against an attractive task." 

A writer in "School and Society" has pointed out 
that since life is a series of decisions, of the solution of 
some problems which must be solved alone and of 
others to be solved in cooperation, the real test of good 
teaching is its success in preparing the student in this 
laboratory of life to be ready to solve both types of 
problems, the individual and the social. 

Interesting attempts are being made to break down 
the student convention that college studies are remote 
from everyday interests, — as, for example, Professor 
Slosson's scheme of teaching history backward from 
current events, — and these will have their influence 
upon the equally absurd faculty convention that the 
remoteness of certain subjects is in itself a desirable 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 315 

attribute, because in some mysterious way this adds to 
their value as a training for the mind. 

Ten years ago the question of examinations and ex- 
amination-passing would have deserved a chapter by 
itself. It is less important to-day, because much 
greater relative weight is given to class- work in term, to 
outside reading, and the preparation of essays. Even 
the lecture courses of eminent and often soft-hearted 
professors are usually supplemented by quizzing by 
some heartless instructor. Professors naturally make 
mistakes in their grades, but taking into consideration 
the general institutional tradition in marking, they 
furnish a pretty fair test on the whole. A student 
sometimes complains to me that "Dr. X gave me an 
*F' when I really deserved a 'C.'" I usually ask him 
how he fared with Dr. Y. "Oh, I got a 'B' in his 
course." (It should be observed that invariably the 
teacher imposes the low grades and the student wins 
the high ones.) Such a student can usually be made 
to see that even though Dr. X may have under- 
estimated him, there is an equal chance that Dr. Y 
over-estimated him to an equal degree. As a matter 
of fact the average which a student receives in his five 
or six subjects is a pretty good relative indication of 
what he deserves. I am not pretending that the pass- 
ing standards all along the line are high enough in the 
college, as contrasted with the professional and techni- 



3i6 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

cal school, perhaps for the reason characteristically set 
forth by Dr. Slosson: — 

The instructor of a technical school always has in the 
back of his mind the thought that if he passes this doubtful 
student in mathematics, he is likely to be called upon some 
time to certify to his ability to build a bridge and will not 
be able to refuse, whatever his private misgivings. Conse- 
quently he gives himself the benefit of a doubt and gives 
the student a failure. If a professor of English had to cer- 
tify that his graduates could tell a bad book from a good 
one and point out its faults, he would be more strict. 

The most significant development of recent years is, 
as I have intimated, a new attitude between teacher 
and student. Ten years ago I collected some statistics 
from Dartmouth and Columbia alumni as to their 
selection of careers, and out of six hundred or more 
replies to my questions only a single man confessed 
that his choice had been influenced by the advice of 
one of his professors. To-day I am confident that a 
similar inquiry would show very different results. In 
the better colleges a real camaraderie has developed 
and with it a proportional increase in that particular 
kind of teaching that can be best done outside the 
classroom. As a measure of insurance the colleges have 
built up their systems of official advisers, deans, etc. 
but the work of such officers, from the very nature of 
the official relationship, is less effective than the spon- 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 317 

taneous intimacies that grow up between teacher and 
student. Student disorder in the classroom will still 
break out without delay in any college in the presence 
of an incompetent teacher, but where a professor can 
interest his students, the problem of controlling them 
presents no difficulties. In some colleges the specially 
good students are given the ''privilege " of helping their 
comrades who have fallen behind — and they so re- 
gard it. 

The professor has always had close relations with the 
favorite pupil who planned to go on in his particular 
field, but the relation is now much wider. It is tending 
to display the professor in a more amiable light to the 
students and is, I think, tending to attract more of the 
most promising students, those with both abihty and 
background, into the field of teaching, particularly 
since the social and political sciences are to-day touch- 
ing the enthusiasm of earnest boys as nothing has since 
the reign of the biological sciences twenty-odd years 
ago. In my judgment the truth is not so much that 
seniors of this desirable type have turned away in re- 
cent years from a calling with apparently slight finan- 
cial reward, as that they have n't appreciated the real 
opportunities and privileges of the profession. It is 
earnestly to be hoped that the general dislocation 
caused by the war will not permanently retard this 
movement. Incidentally the records made by English 



3i8 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

dons, and by many of our professors here since war 
was declared, indicate that men in academic life are 
not ill-prepared to meet national emergencies. 

The really important thing is to get more such into 
our faculties. As I have said, the tradition of perma- 
nence of tenure means that the failures in teaching re- 
main and must be balanced by positive successes. We 
all know the professor of desultory interests who wan- 
ders all over the lot, but it takes a good all-round man 
to teach his subject properly and still seize the chances 
that he has to teach needed lessons outside his sub- 
ject. Failures are more often due to a lack of social 
experience and general horse sense than to deficiencies 
of scholarship. It is like having a color-blind pilot to 
have students exposed to professors who won't give a 
bright student the maximum mark because he does n't 
have to work so hard in the class as the plodder. There 
is even a tale of a man who, when urged by his mor« 
rigorous colleagues to "condition'* at least a few of his 
students, carefully selected for low grades the ablest 
men in the class, on the ground that these could re- 
move the resulting condition with the least inconven- 
ience. 

A most perplexing problem to-day is as to the use in 
college of our mother tongue. We used to get boys who 
had learned its proper use unconsciously at home, but 
this is not so now; indeed, to many students English is 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 319 

not the mother tongue. Under the stimulus of this 
problem college instruction in English has improved 
enormously , but no one department can carry the whole 
burden and we have great need of men in all fields 
whose EngHsh is ^'contagiously good." 

The all-round man can also expose his students to 
the contagion of good manners. Sometimes, alas, the 
manners of our teachers are such that not only are the 
ignorant left in their ignorance, but the effect upon the 
students who happen to be well-mannered themselves 
is most unfortunate. Let me give a brutal instance. 
I know of a case where a student gave the following 
** underground railway" advice regarding a course by 
a certain professor: **For Heaven's sake. No; he may 
know his subject, but he spits on the radiator." The 
point in the story is not as to the relative importance 
of knowing one's subject and knowing the proper func- 
tions of a radiator, but that the professor in question 
lost his chance with this particular student and doubt- 
less with many others. 

I am told this matter of social background has one 
particularly unfortunate effect in the more fashionable 
colleges, where the socially elect among the students 
are said to find ways, in the case of their more callow 
instructors, of substituting social recognition of a 
good-natured, patronizing type for attention to aca- 
demic duties. 



320 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

There is no doubt that there has come to be a differ- 
ence in type between teachers in the separate colleges 
and the university colleges, just as there is among the 
students, and as with the latter the advantages are not 
all on either side. According to Professor Wolfe, of the 
University of Texas, the smaller colleges in their selec- 
tion of teachers "look first for personality and moral 
character, and too often, even yet, for religious ortho- 
doxy. Scholarship ordinarily comes second with them. 
The imiversities give scant attention to moral charac- 
ter — taking it for granted — and think too little of 
personaHty, so long as a candidate has a record of first- 
class scholarship and has shown abiHty at research in 
his special field.'' He goes on to say that "neither col- 
lege nor university bothers to inquire whether he has 
any human interests outside his own immediate field, 
or whether, especially, he has ever given serious thought 
to the possible diverse and contradictory aims of 
higher education, to the problems of departmental or- 
ganization, or to the larger questions of educational 
policy as a whole." 

The city mouse regards his country cousin as a 
solemn and rather ponderous person, unused to contra- 
diction, who talks about people instead of ideas; and 
the country cousin bewails the flippancy, cynicism, 
and the agnosticism of the other. Looking at it from 
the student's point of view, the imdergraduates in the 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 321 

separate colleges get the full time of the best men and 
these men are not so likely to be overworked as in the 
universities. The more promising of the younger men 
are not tempted into other fields, with the danger of 
leaving a predominance of mediocre men on the under- 
graduate staff. Teaching, as such, is held more at a 
premium, although there are honorable exceptions 
among university colleges. There is a greater chance 
for intimacy with students, though the greater ap- 
preciation of its importance in the university college 
often outweighs the natural advantages of the other. 
Finally, the teachers have a better opportunity for 
open-air exercise, and there is, therefore, less excuse 
for the nervous irritation that plays havoc with effec- 
tive teaching. 

On the other hand, we have the more rapid intellec- 
tual pace of the university, the stimulating presence of 
great intellectual leaders, an atmosphere of productive 
scholarship, of intellectual humility rather than com- 
placency or didacticism. The men have fewer oppor- 
timities for exercise, but their family life is less likely to 
be harassed by squabbles of the army post type. The 
tendency of the ambitious college teacher is rightly or 
wrongly to leave the small college for the xmiversity 
at the first opportunity. 

Conditions in both types of institution could be im- 
proved by the development of a system of exchanges 



322 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

for a year or a term. Under present conditions the men 
in the universities won't leave without definite assur- 
ance of a return to their places. Such a plan has been 
started at Harvard by an exchange with four Western 
colleges and less formally at Columbia and elsewhere, 
and there is no reason why it should not be consider- 
ably developed. Much has already been done to en* 
large the horizons of professors in the separate colleges 
by their service in the summer sessions of the uni- 
versities. 

It ought also to be possible within the imiversities to 
provide opportunities for the imdergraduates and par- 
ticularly the freshmen to meet the really big men, 
even though for only part of a term. Such men with 
their other opportunities for usefulness cannot be 
blamed for hesitating to give up an entire term to a 
class of youngsters, but I believe, though I have never 
been able to get my teaching colleagues to agree with 
me, that they could be inserted to good effect in an 
undergraduate class for four or five meetings some- 
where toward the end of the term. ^ 

As a matter of fact the distinction for the student 
investor to make is not between the large or the small 
college, or between the separate or university college, 
so much as it is between the live and the dead college. 
It is in the dead colleges that a student comes to think 
that "truth is what you read in a book," and where 



TEACHING AND TEACHERS 323 

the professors' chairs are placed with "their backs to 
the horses," as Ben Butler used to say of the Demo- 
cratic politicians, so "that they never see a thing until 
after it has gone by.*' 

I have been tempted to go into this question of 
teaching and teachers at perhaps greater length than 
is "in scale" in a book of this type, because I feel 
strongly that the path of progress for our colleges lies 
in conscious emphasis, not on greater administrative 
efficiency, nor on faculty regulations as to majors and 
minors and degrees, but on the fullest possible develop- 
ment of close and productive cooperation between the 
students and the right type of teachers. 



CHAPTER XIII 
CONCLUSION 

Some one has said that no written record can be 
really satisfactory, because after all a string of words is 
limited to one dimension, and life as we experience it 
is in three dimensions — or maybe more. Certainly 
it is a difficult task to make clear the different and 
interdependent aspects of the student's relations to his 
college while dealing with these relations as separate 
things,^ and for this reason I may be forgiven if I try 
to sum up in a passage or two our progress thus far. 

In the beginning I have tried to give some picture 
of the kinds of colleges we have, and how they devel- 
oped, the separate institution and the university col- 
lege, the State-supported and the privately endowed, 
the urban, suburban, and the rural, the progressive 
and the conservative, and, most important, the genu- 
ine and the more or less spurious. I have touched upon 
the effect upon the colleges of the outbreak of the Great 
War. Some information as to the different kinds of 
boys who now go to college and what they bring with 
them has followed, and then a description of the life 
which the students have organized for themselves, its 



CONCLUSION 325 

nature and its effect upon the newcomer. Athletics, as 
the most conspicuous of student activities, have been 
given a chapter to themselves, as have the questions 
of the student's religion and morals, and his intellec- 
tual life. I then tried to show how the college itself is 
organized for its work, the part of the trustees, presi- 
dent, dean, and faculty, and how the various phases of 
administration and teaching touch the individual stu- 
dent. And, in Chapter IX, the result of all these forces, 
sometimes cooperating and sometimes conflicting, as we 
can judge them from the finished product, the alumnus. 
In all the mass of detail I hope that certain fundamen- 
tal matters have not been obscured, particularly the 
influence throughout of our historical background and 
our present environmental conditions, the growing 
emphasis upon the individual and his needs, the closer 
and more profitable relationship between teacher and 
student, and the growth, slow but sure, of student 
responsibility both individual and corporate. 

In order to see our own system in perspective, some 
comparison with ante-bellum conditions abroad is 
worth while. In Great Britain there are really two 
systems, the time-honored class organization, repre- 
sented by the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and 
Trinity College, Dublin (the other colleges, so-called, 
in England being really secondary schools), and the 



326 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

municipal universities, which have no particular social 
sanction. The identification of Oxford and Cambridge 
with public life in England is something which has no 
coimterpart here. For example, a single college of Ox- 
ford University during the nineteenth century supplied 
no fewer than nine prime ministers to England. They 
have developed farther along certain lines, most desir- 
able in themselves, than any institutions in the world. 
Their emphasis has been upon actual residence in the 
colleges, and on the college life that this implies. The 
whole thing is beautifully ordered and could teach 
many lessons to our rather slovenly young men. They 
have also solved the problem of regular exercise for 
every one, a problem with which we are only beginning 
to cope. 

The comment of a recent Rhodes scholar with regard 
to' the conservatism of these institutions may be of 
interest: "While Oxford is essentially open-minded 
toward new ideas, it seldom accepts them. Though 
willing to hear the innovator, it decides against him." 
These Rhodes scholars have made Oxford and Oxford 
life much better known in America, but I doubt 
whether the extent of their direct influence has been as 
great as the foimder had in mind when he made his 
princely benefaction. On the purely educational side, 
some of these Rhodes scholars have put their fingers 
on one of the weakest spots in our school and college 



■li 



CONCLUSION 327 

system — " the tendency to superficial interest in a 
variety of subjects and the temptation to avoid the 
thorough work and hard grind necessary to know essen- 
tials well, from the multiplication table to the grammar 
of a language or the severe analysis of a science." One 
reason for this thoroughness may well be the practical 
benefits to be enjoyed by men who have made brilliant 
university careers. A man with a Double First at 
Oxford can aim as high as he pleases in any career, and 
usually gets what he aims for. 

The municipal institutions are of comparatively 
recent development, but their faculties include many 
of the best scholars and scientists in England. They 
make no provision for the residence of students, and, 
indeed, the whole emphasis until very recently has been 
on examination, with the result that many degrees are 
granted to men and women whom the authorities 
hardly know by sight. It is interesting, however, that 
London University is looking in the other direction, and 
is proposing to do away with degree examinations for 
external candidates. 

The Scotch universities and colleges have developed 
along different Hnes from their neighbors to the south. 
There is a real social democracy, but combined with a 
highly developed intellectual aristocracy. From the 
reminiscences of Robert Louis Stevenson and others, 
I am inclined to think that the undergraduate life in 



328 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

these colleges has more in common with our own than 
that of any other country across the Atlantic. 

The colleges in the Commonwealths of the British 
Empire, particularly those in Canada, have developed 
under conditions so similar to our own in their rapid 
growth that they can hardly be called foreign. It 
would be well for us to study them more closely than 
we do, to judge from the striking number of our best 
professors on this side of the line who have been pre- 
pared in the Canadian institutions. 

When we compare roughly the Continental systems 
with our own, we find the following fundamental dif- 
ferences: In the first place, centralized State control 
is practically uniform. The debilitating competition 
which, with us, results in many feeble institutions in- 
stead of a few strong ones, is non-existent. 

Secondly, there is a different breaking-off point be- 
tween secondary and collegiate training. Our college 
represents really the last two, or in some cases the last 
three, years of the Gymnasium or Lycee, plus the first 
or the first and second years of the university. 

Third, there is a complete lack of personal responsi- 
bility for manners and morals, for idleness or industry, 
and for that reason the Continental institutions feel 
completely free from responsibilities which take much 
of our energy and thought. 



CONCLUSION 329 

Fourth, the preliminary collegiate training offers the 
only gateway to professional careers, and for this rea- 
son the ambitious man is not tempted, as he is with us, 
to forego the long road of preparation for a profession. 

The French have one great lesson to teach us, though 
perhaps it is not so much due to the educational sys- 
tem of the Republic as to the genius of the people, and 
that lesson is one of frankly recognized pleasure in 
brain activity for its own sake. 

It is characteristic of modem France that its insti- 
tutions of learning are never likely to settle down into 
complacent routine, and just before the war broke out 
there had been a vigorous campaign against the Uni- 
versity of France in its spirit and oflScial teaching, and 
in its pretension to form the mind and will of the 
French people. "In France the imiversity is in politics 
and politics is religion, just as religion too often — and 
anti-religion always — is poHtics." The interesting 
thing for us is that the fight was waged, not as here by 
professors and mature outsiders, but largely by the 
students, yoimg alumni, and young outsiders. We 
really ought to know more about the French educa- 
tional system than we do, and one of the results of the 
fraternizing on the battlefields of France will doubtless 
be that many of our college-bred men will return to 
spread through our land this knowledge, gained from 
French companions. 



330 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The German system is much more familiar to us; the 
number of our own men interested in educational mat- 
ters who have studied in Germany is very considerable, 
and our tradition nms back for fourscore years, 
whereas the English influence, via the Rhodes schol- 
ars, is just beginning to be felt, and the French type 
of education for Americans has been mainly confined 
to the study of architecture in the ficole des Beaux- 
Arts. 

The force of German education upon the nation is 
seen by us to-day in a sinister light, but this must not 
blind us to the salutary lessons which it can teach. 
Besides the difference in the horizontal lines between 
secondary and higher training, there are other sharp 
elements of contrast. To quote Professor Farrington: 
**The German Gymnasium makes a ruthless selection. 
It rejects without compimction large nmnbers whom 
we in America endeavor to educate; and on the educa- 
tion of this picked minority it brings to bear such pres- 
sure as we can never hope to apply — family pressure, 
social pressure, official pressure." ^ 

For the Gymnasium students and for a majority of 
the imiversity students, there is nothing to compare 
with our college life. To make a comparison here, we 
must take the student of a university who joins some 
Corps or BurschenschafL In these days of military 
activity it is easier for us to appreciate than it would 



CONCLUSION 331 

have been five years ago the emphasis of these organ- 
izations on the identification of military with uni- 
versity life. Professor Swift, of the University of 
Minnesota, has recently pubHshed some interesting 
reminiscences of his experience in a German student 
organization. "The youth who joins himself to a stu- 
dent corporation cannot fail to bear its mark for the 
rest of his life. He enters it at that period of life when 
youth is of all times most receptive to social and per- 
sonal ideals and for one, two, or three years he imbibes 
its modes of thought and attitude toward Ufe. The 
range of his social activities and pastimes is exceed- 
ingly narrow. The great world of wholesome physical 
and intellectual enjoyment open to American uni- 
versity youths is almost unknown." 

While we may well doubt the value of the example 
as to the drinking and dueling which these institutions 
set, there is no doubt that we can profit by the whole- 
some emphasis upon group singing, "and any one," 
as Professor Swift concludes, "who studies the life of 
these organizations sympathetically will be forced to 
admit that the courage, frankness, truthfulness, sim- 
plicity, and patriotism of the youth who has been 
trained as a Bursch, his gracious manners and fine con- 
sideration of his guests, are qualities which the youth 
of every land would do well to emulate." 

One very serious indictment of the German system 



331 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

is the waste of all or most of the first year of university 
residence, following the too great strictness of the gym- 
nasium and before the social pressure for graduation 
with credit from the university has become imminent 
enough to be operative. Professor Boas, one of our 
most eminent scholars, has told me that he did Hter- 
ally no work during the first year of his university 
career. 

In extolling our freedom from formality, with the 
rigid prescriptions of a German imiversity, where a 
man has to don a dress coat and white gloves when he 
calls upon the professor to ask leave to enroll in a 
course of lectures, we must not forget that the central- 
ized State control means not only a high average of 
professional appointments, but a tremendous simplifi- 
cation in administration as compared with our ma- 
chinery. Simplification, however, has its drawbacks. 
In the Hbrary of the University of Leipsic, for instance, 
it is only very recently that a card catalogue was in- 
stalled, and the lack of such modern improvements 
entails a serious loss of time. Before the war the Ger- 
mans were studying rather carefully the possibility 
of adopting some of our administrative plans. They 
were also beginning to modify somewhat the content 
of their traditional courses, particularly along the lines 
of emphasizing the present as well as the past. ' Twen- 
ty-five years ago," to quote the late Professor Tombo, 



CONCLUSION 333 

"the average German professor would have considered 
it beneath his dignity to deal at all with contemporane- 
ous events. The American may be inclined to go too 
far in this direction; but he undoubtedly gains much 
from his invariable tendency to study those particular 
problems which are of immediate import." 

I have referred earher in this book to the identifi- 
cation in Germany of the educational system with the 
national Hfe. This naturally raised the question of the 
freedom on the part of the individual to choose his 
own career. Under the old system whereby the Gym- 
nasium was the only path which led to public life, 
the decision had to be made on behalf of a child by his 
parents at about the age of nine. The recent tendency 
has been toward postponing this decision by a modifi- 
cation of the educational system. The municipality of 
Frankfort was the first to adopt a plan which allowed 
more leeway, and by its system the choice may in 
effect be postponed until the age of fourteen. Today, 
out of about five hundred Gymnasien about a third 
have adopted the Frankfort plan. 

The Scandinavian institutions have Httle to teach 
us that Germany has not, though perhaps we could 
profit by their simpler and less rigid scheme of things. 
Not long ago I got a picture post-card from a colleague 
who was visiting the University of Copenhagen, with 
the following marginal note: "Dignified, intellectual, 



334 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

and effective, unathletic, unshower-bathed, and un- 
comfortable — this place has moved along in the even 
tenor of its way for 437 years, and it will continue to 
do so." 

When we remember that we have only one college 
in America which goes back to the seventeenth cen- 
tury, it is interesting to recall that eleven of Italy's 
twenty-one imiversities date from the fourteenth cen- 
tury or earlier. A recent book on them tells us: "Uni- 
versity life is eaten through by lawlessness, which 
breaks out every spring in periodic riots. The perverse 
State regulations forbid the holding of examinations 
in any but completed courses of lectures. If the stu- 
dents can break up a class before the end of the term, 
there is one less subject to be examined in. They carry 
out their programme thoroughly. Any student may 
drop into any course whenever he likes, and on warm 
spring days the professor is sure to see his class in- 
vaded by a mob of young men determined to see it 
closed. 'The police cannot enter without the consent 
of the rector, who shrinks from anything which casts'a 
reflection on his own power to keep order. Ministerial 
decree ends the lectures, and the students triumph.' " 

The Italian universities at the outbreak of the war 
were struggling with the problem of a too highly edu- 
cated proletariat. With us the college man is not re- 
garded as of different clay from his fellows, and if 



CONCLUSION 335 

there is a place where his services are needed he turns 
to it. On the Continent, however, the university man 
must either enter an already crowded profession, or 
the civil service, or become an unclassified and dan- 
gerous element in the community. 

It is perhaps to early for us to know just what part 
the Russian imiversities have played in the revolu- 
tion, but for many years the students and many of the 
professors have been identified with political affairs, 
perhaps more closely than in any other country. 

The only other lands in which conditions are suffi- 
ciently similar to ours are the South American Repub- 
lics and we might profitably be more familiar with 
their educational organization; for one thing they 
have succeeded far better than have we in practical 
training in the r^odem languages. There are now 
many agencies encouraging a North and South move- 
ment of students and it is quite as important for some 
of us to move South as for the South American stu- 
dents to move North for their training. 

The things which seem to be typical of our organi- 
zation as compared with others are a college Kfe 
based on sufficiently broad principles to take in all 
social classes and the elasticity of entrance both into 
college and from college into various careers. The 
things for us to consider, in looking for corresponding 



336 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

lessons for us to learn, are the emphasis on thorough- 
ness in the details, and on production in the higher 
reaches of education, the recognition and reward of 
excellence in accomplishment, the acceptance of thor- 
ough preparation as opposed to educational short-cuts. 

We have seen, so far as my powers can portray, 
what the college of to-day is and how it operates, and 
by a rapid comparison with other coimtries have seen 
the elements in our system which distinguish it from 
others. There is probably no part of our educational 
scheme that is less the result of deliberate planning 
than the undergraduate college. It has just "growed," 
and we must not forget that it is still growing. When 
I began this book I had some more or less definite ideas 
as to its direction, but we are now in the midst of a 
great war, and before we are through with it, and with 
the period of reconstruction which must follow, many 
of our educational processes will doubtless be found 
upon the scrap-heap along with obsolete engines of 
attack and defense. This does not mean, of course, 
that truth itself has changed, — a fact we are in dan- 
ger of overlooking in the general bouleversementy — 
but only man's applications of it. The mathematics 
used by the ordnance officer of 1 913 is as true now as 
then, although his application of it may be wholly 
different. For this reason the forecast with which this 



CONCLUSION 337 

book closes must be even more general than I had in- 
tended at first, and will consider mainly whether the 
college as a social and political institution, devised for 
the profitable prolongation of the period of infancy, is 
likely to remain a permanent element in our organized 
life. 

The time has, therefore, come to consider the seri- 
ous and sincere criticism of those who believe that the 
American people are on the wrong track, and that 
these irreplaceable learning years should be employed 
in a manner so different that whether the name per- 
sists or not, the American college as we know it ought 
before long to be a thing of the past. 

There is a very voluminous, and, in part, a very in- 
teresting, body of radical criticism of the American 
college in general to-day. Seven years ago President 
Wilson stated publicly that '* the colleges of this coun- 
try must be reconstructed from top to bottom, and I 
know that America is going to demand it." And 
somewhat later, the President of the University of 
Chicago wrote in his annual report: "The American 
college problem as it exists in the opening decades of 
the twentieth century has not yet been solved, and 
needs a very careful and intelligent study. It would not 
be surprising if the result of that study should be some 
quite startling changes in the existing organization." 

It behooves those of us who do not believe that so 



338 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

drastic a revolution is necessary at least to consider 
the reasons why these men and others have come to 
their conclusions. There is a temptation to under- 
estimate the value of the criticism for several reasons. 
In the first place, much of it — for example of that of 
the late Mr. Crane, which perhaps received the widest 
newspaper publicity of all — is based upon pretty 
complete ignorance of actual conditions. Others are 
based upon the unfair assumption that some poor col- 
lege, or some poor product even of a good college, is 
characteristic of the situation as a whole. Those of us 
who are brought personally into contact with our crit- 
ics are maddened by their refusal to learn any facts 
which might interfere inconveniently with their theo- 
ries; and also by the constant reiteration of certain 
catch-words which serve the critics in the place of 
ideas. 

A more fundamental difficulty in profiting by these 
criticisms is in that so often they are mutually con- 
tradictory. When two men maintain simultaneously 
that the only hope of progress is in greater concentra- 
tion, and in greater diversity, respectively, we know 
that we cannot satisfy them both. The critics at each 
end of any particular line always succeed in proving 
too much, and very often those in the middle do not 
bother to prove anything. 

The critics also are prone to overlook the dangers 



u 



CONCLUSION 339 

that would come from a dislocation of the existing 
machinery. Impatience for immediate results, how- 
ever, is a very natural instinct. Herbert Spencer once 
said that *'an amiable anxiety to undo, or neutralize 
an evil, often prompts to rash courses, as you may see 
in the hurry with which one who has fallen is snatched 
up by those at hand; just as though there were danger 
in letting him He, which there is not, and no danger in 
incautiously raising him, which there is.'' 

Fundamental changes cannot be brought about by 
some ipse dixit, for no one can work faster than the 
personaHties and prejudices of a going concern can be 
counted upon to take up the changes. The reformer 
wants to make his alterations too suddenly, forgetting 
that the change must come through agencies which he 
does not and cannot directly control. 

In general our critics are too prone to extravagance, 
solemnity, and petulance. We need more good-hu- 
mored criticism, and less of the work of what President 
Butler has termed the academic pathologist. It is not 
only in the Western country described by Owen Wis- 
ter that there are certain things which may profitably 
be said only when accompanied by a smile. The critic, 
who, like the author of "The Dominie's Log" in Scot- 
land, can laugh with you is far more effective than he 
who laughs at you, and infinitely more effective than 
the critic who can't laugh at all. * 



340 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

When all is said and done, however, it would be a 
still greater mistake to brush aside this criticism from 
our minds than to take it all at its face value. There is 
no doubt that the college has suffered from its extraor- 
dinary popularity, and a very fair likelihood that it 
may need not only individual and incidental changes, 
but a thorough house-cleaning, and we who beHeve in 
it should be ready to accept the burden of proof. We 
must be sufficiently patient to wade through the miles 
of criticism based on imperfect knowledge, or upon de- 
termination to see the worst in everything, or to see 
everything through the lens of some preconceived 
theory, for the sake now and then of getting some 
practical hint toward improvement which many prove 
to be worth all the trouble. 

Out of the mass of details, what are the basal criti- 
cisms of the college as it exists to-day? In Reed Col- 
lege, President Foster started what he believed to be, 
in essence, a new type of educational institution, for 
the reason that he found the existing college undemo- 
cratic, with students failing to profit by their oppor- 
tunities, with uncorrelated courses, and a faculty that 
stood aloof, an extravagant scale of Hving, a tendency 
to accept (upon a stupid system of admission) more 
students than could properly be dealt with, a general 
lack of student self-government, clumsy and unin- 



CONCLUSION 341 

telligent systems of standards and advancement, 
remoteness from the community, and a system of ath- 
letics for a handful of students only. This college is 
still too young to say definitely whether all these 
faults can be permanently eradicated. 

Personally I should say that the most serious in- 
dictments are the following: In the first place, a gen- 
eral lack of thoroughness. This is the criticism of the 
professional school and of the businesss men, and our 
status is compared unfavorably with the conditions 
abroad. Secondly, a lack of seriousness, a feeling that 
in the phrase *' prolongation of infancy," the word 
"infancy" is taken too literally. The critics of this 
type are likely to be internal, and if it had not been for 
the lesson of the war, and the way our students have 
entered into its responsibiHties, their case would be a 
pretty strong one. Finally, there is the question of a 
lack of adjustment; in the first place, to the educa- 
tional system as a whole, and secondly, and even more 
important, to the general social system. 

In facing these charges, and many of them are seri- 
ous and sincere, we must beg the umpires, whoever 
they may be, to recognize not only the mutually con- 
tradictory nature of much of the criticism, but also 
that the college cannot possibly do everything, and 
that some things neither it nor any other institution 
can do at all. The college cannot be taken as an iso- 



342 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

lated phenomenon, but must be reckoned with as part 
of a larger system, in which we take what we get, and 
where what we do is conditioned on what is to come 
after. The students within our walls are after all 
pretty young, both in years and experience. They are 
immersed in an uneasy environment through which 
great social forces are working, rather blindly on the 
whole. 

It is easy, and perhaps natural, to praise and blame 
the college folks for the vices of human nature and 
conduct; to rate a boy for carelessness when we our- 
selves are carrying in our pockets the letters our wives 
have given us to post, and for silly social standards 
when Americans by the thousands "fall" for all sorts 
of pseudo-scholarly aiid scientific societies, to which 
they pay their five dollars, and as a result feel them- 
selves in some mysterious way to be allied to the 
Forty Immortals. The college years, after all, occupy 
only ten per cent of a normal life, and what the boy 
is depends far more largely than we are likely to re- 
member on what he brings from his home. The change 
which takes place in a West Pointer is based on a 
day of twenty-four hours' control, instead of perhaps 
three, and the rough-and-ready product of a Western 
engineering school, with whom our boys are often un- 
favorably compared, is primarily the product of a 
pioneering environment. 



CONCLUSION 343 

Bearing in mind these limitations as to what it is 
possible to perform, let us take up first the question 
of an over-emphasized college life, postponing for the 
moment the question of thoroughness. Professor 
Crossley, of Wesleyan, has framed the indictment as 
follows: "College life is a complex environment in 
which delusions and distractions play significant parts. 
Men catch its spirit as by contagion and soon become 
a part of it. Among the great delusions of student life, 
none is more damaging to the real triumph of truth 
than that which fosters the belief, so largely shared by 
students, that on matriculation one leaves the world's 
problems and responsibilities outside the campus 
gates. . . . Campus, club, and social activities present 
their claims for time, with accompanying assurances 
of rewards that are concrete and immediate. Study 
beckons, too, but its goal is not in sight. The 
student is dazed at first and is in doubt as to the 
proper choice, but he usually falls in line with the 
majority, choosing to put off study until some future 
time when there will not be quite so much demand for 
his time." 

Mr. Owen Johnson, in "Stover at Yale," has clothed 
his somewhat similar charges in the mantle of fiction, 
and Dr. Charles L. Dana has summed up the whole 
matter to the effect that the college boy is not edu- 
cated, he does not want to be educated, but only to 



344 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

"make'' his letter and his clubs, and in due season to 
graduate. 

In considering college Kfe, either for the purpose of 
attack or defense, it is none too easy to specify just 
what we mean. Where, for example, should we put 
athletics for the men who actually play the games? 
Fortunately, the reader can understand better than 
the author can define. I have already paid my respects 
to the conventionalism of it all. It is preposterous, 
but it is true, that an expert could pick out from a 
group of college seniors, almost unerringly by their 
walks and conversation, the *' Bones" man and the 
"Ivy" man, or the representative of the Porcellian, or 
the WilHams Tea Company. 

Besides the prompt and widespread entry of these 
careless youths into responsible military service, there 
are other facts to be brought forward in rebuttal. The 
"'Rah 'Rah" boy is a bird of conspicuous plumage 
and therefore easily recognized, but, as some academic 
punster has pointed out, relatively he is a rara avis 
among the thousands and thousands of collegians 
of more sober hue whom the critic never observes 
at all. 

Another factor which has been imobserved or ignored 
by him is the growing tendency toward a closer bond 
between these student enterprises and the more pur- 
poseful activities of the institution, religious, social, 



CONCLUSION 345 

and intellectual; the frontier barriers between L'fe 
and study are gradually being obliterated. For these 
and other reasons, the wasting of time and energy 
upon trivialities has already passed its worst stage, 
and the charge, though still a serious one, is valid 
rather for the remediable faults than for fundamental 
ones. 

After all, a young animal (and an old one, for that 
matter) needs a reasonable time for relaxation, and 
the relaxation of the American undergraduate, if some- 
times silly, is very seldom sordid. He turns from it to 
his studies in a debonair spirit which his professors 
admit often achieves better results than the grim earn- 
estness of the grind. We are learning, too, that pag- 
eantry — and much of all this is pageantry of one kind 
or another — may have a very important part to play 
in normal human Hfe. 

In the strong colleges, higher academic standards 
are furnishing the most effective defensive measure 
against a lack of realization of time values, and little 
by little faculties are learning how to stimulate intel- 
lectual interests in such a way as to develop a better 
sense of proportion. 

The whole process of rationalizing college life would 
move much faster if it were not for the emphasis 
placed upon it by parents and outsiders. It may be, 
and I believe it is, worth while, but not for the reasons 



346 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

alleged. Much of the talk about social experiences and 
making friends, for example, is addressed to those who 
will have plenty of opportimity for these desirable 
possessions in the normal course of events, but pre- 
cious little likelihood of gaining intellectual experi- 
ences and literary intimacies unless time is made for 
the process to begin in college. 

The best justification of college life is that it approx- 
imates, sometimes more closely than the curriculum 
itself, the new ideas of what education ought to be. It 
has not been imposed upon college conditions, but has 
grown up out of them, and in its groping way it fur- 
nishes a training in *' education by doing'* — which the 
educational prophets of our day tell us is a far soimder 
process than is education by being told. It is just be- 
cause these things are part of education that they must 
be watched and checked. Education may be bad as 
well as good. The worst kind of habits, for example, 
are to be learned from slack managers' work. On the 
other hand, the student must not lose the sense of 
spontaneity and responsibility in his enterprises, or 
the whole thing becomes as perfunctory as the dullest 
hour in the classroom. One of the most useful lessons 
in life is how to make time for something you want to 
do. There is nothing like it to give a value to the thing 
when done, and this cannot be learned in a college 
where the academic standards are so low that for the 



CONCLUSION 347 

students time is something to be killed, instead of 
something to be carefully saved. 

This is another way of saying that whether the ad- 
vantages to the student of college Hfe as we know it 
are to outweigh the disadvantages will in the long run 
depend very largely on the faculty. College professors 
of the older generation have seen and perhaps they re- 
member the effect of standing aloof from athletic con- 
ditions as they developed. How are the faculties of 
to-day facing the more subtle form of corruption 
which comes from an over-developed and ill-organized 
student life, of which athletics is only one factor? In 
many colleges the faculty has again buried its head in 
the sand, or perhaps has removed it long enough to 
whimper at its inabihty to do anything. In others, 
the faculty and alumni between them are over-hand- 
ling the whole thing, and really doing the boys' play- 
ing for them. In some few, however, and the number 
is happily increasing, the boys are being guided but 
not exploited. This art which conceals art is exercised 
sometimes by some specially designated officer, as at 
Brown, more often as a fruit of the informal relations 
which are springing up between teachers and students. 
Wherever the faculty relation is wholesome, the right 
kind of alumni cooperation is fostered and the wrong 
kind discouraged. And finally, I shall be greatly dis- 
appointed if we cannot count upon the growing sense 



348 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

of responsibility of the boys themselves (tempered by 
their sense of the ludicrous) to check the evils of college 
life and to foster its benefits. 

The second question is more or less allied with the 
foregoing, but it involves also the nature of teaching 
which students receive, both as to the fields covered 
and the fields avoided. Is the college preparing its 
generations of young men (and young women, though 
this is not so close to our problem) for the kind of a 
world which these people will enter after graduation? 
The charge is that the college, partly consciously and 
partly unconsciously, is looking backward or, at any 
rate, looking down at its feet. By its teaching and 
through its conventions it is preparing students for 
life in this world as it was, rather than looking for- 
ward to prepare them to meet the conditions that are 
to come. It is most commonly brought forward by 
those who feel that what the world most needs is a 
thorough revolution of the social order, a revolution 
in which they would like the college to be the acceler- 
ator rather than the brake that they think it now is. 
According to them, the college government is fet- 
tered by the gifts from members of the exploiting 
classes, and its governing bodies, trustees primarily, 
and faculties to a lesser degree, are dehberately (and 
conscientiously, which makes it all the worse) holding 



CONCLUSION 349 

back the generous spirit of youth from the goal toward 
which it should be striving. They feel that the whole 
scheme of college hfe is a powerful factor in training 
boys to a false and dangerous standard of values, and 
that such attention as they give to their studies is de- 
voted to maintaining the outworn standards of culture 
from which the world should be striving to escape. As 
a result, not only are the sons of the exploiting classes 
carefully guarded during their learning years from 
getting the facts and cultivating the emotions and im- 
pulses that they should, but the sons of the workers 
who make their way to college, instead of being pre- 
pared for the leadership of tlieir class, are subtly shorn 
of their strength and turned from the ideals they 
should follow to the baser and more selfish aims of the 
exploiting classes. 

Doubtless some of you may be comfortably thinking 
as you read that this is all pretty far-fetched and rep- 
resents at best the vaporings of a handful of hare- 
brained cranks. It may be admitted that every crank 
on these subjects is a critic of the college, while deny- 
ing as I do that every such critic is a crank. Horace 
Greeley, it will be remembered, once denied that he 
had ever said that every Democrat was a horse- thief , 
but he took the occasion of this denial to maintain 
that every horse- thief was a Democrat. It should be 
pointed out, perhaps, that the number of leaders of 



3 so THE UNDERGRADUATE 

radical thought, of the younger generation, at any 
rate, who are college graduates, shows that the col- 
leges, even if they were organized for such fell pur- 
poses as their critics assume, are not doing the job any 
too successfully. 

Perhaps it should be said, lest I have failed to make 
my meaning clear, that what I am trying to bring for- 
ward is not a plea for profound changes in the social 
order. So far as the college is concerned, I should not 
be worried if every boy were to graduate as a stand- 
patter, if only his views were based on study and on a 
personal contact with both sides of the question, and 
were not gained through social imitation or intellec- 
tual isolation. Neither Radicals nor Bourbons can be 
made to order in this day and generation, nor can what 
Professor Jastrow calls the democratic suspicion of 
education be justified or disproved offhand. Never- 
theless, the charge is not to be dismissed with a shrug 
of the shoulders. Many a wise observer, while recog- 
nizing and discounting the unvarying tendency of the 
enthusiast to prove too much, is nevertheless wonder- 
ing whether the college fully realizes what its place 
should be in these days of the twentieth century. 
Would the United States throw away a billion dollars, 
as it now does in an ordinary year through strikes, if 
the employers and their representatives — and nowa- 
days they are mostly college-bred men — had learned 



CONCLUSION 351 

what a good college might have taught them about 
their fellow-men? 



Let us make "liberal discounts" for the alarm of 
those who do not think that the colleges are radical at 
all and the alarm of those who regard their influence 
as entirely too radical already. After doing so, those of 
us who believe that while no one can expect the world 
to stand still, evolution will serve better than revolu- 
tion, should still recognize the seriousness and sincer- 
ity of the criticisms made by the radicals, and consider 
whether some of them at any rate may not be met, 
and met without neglect of those things the radicals are 
prone to undervalue, but which constitute either the 
heritage of the ages to our generation, or the individ- 
ual accomplishments in science and scholarship which 
must serve as the leaven for the future. 

This matter brings us to the debatable question of 
what culture is after all and how the college, by in- 
clusions and exclusions, by emphasis and by its re- 
verse, should use its influence. We are doubtless in 
the midst of a general change from the old type of cul- 
ture with the individual as the center to a type in 
which the central idea is the community. Let me 
quote a few sentences from the American who, it 
seems to me, is looking with perhaps the clearest eye 
into the future just now — John Dewey: — 



352 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

I am one of those who think that the only test and justi- 
fication of any form of political and economic society is its 
contribution to art and science — to what may roundly be 
called culture. That America has not yet so justii&ed itself 
is too obvious for even lament. . . . The old culture is 
doomed for us because it was built upon an alliance of polit- 
ical and spiritual powers, an equilibrium of governing and 
leisure classes, which no longer exists. Those who deplore 
the crudities and superficialities of thought and sensation 
which mark our day are rarely inhuman enough to wish the 
old regime back. They are merely unintelligent enough to 
want a result without the conditions which produced it, 
and in the face of conditions making the result no longer 
possible. 

In short, our culture must be consonant with realistic 
science and with machine industry, instead of a refuge from 
them. And while there is no guaranty that an education 
which uses science and employs the controlled processes of 
industry as a regular part of its equipment will succeed, 
there is every assurance that an educational practice which 
sets science and industry in opposition to its ideal of cul- 
ture will fail. Natural science has in its applications to 
economic production and exchange brought an industry 
and a society where quantity alone seems to count. It is 
for education to bring the light of science and the power of 
work to the aid of every soul that it may discover its qual- 
ity. For in a spiritually democratic society every individ- 
ual would realize distinction. Culture would then be for 
the first time in human history an individual achievement 
and not a class possession. An education fit for our ideal 
uses is a matter of actual forces not of opinions. 

It seems to me worthy of most serious attention 
that so few of our guides of youth are endeavoring to 



CONCLUSION 353 

think these questions through. For too many com- 
placency and self-sufficiency prevent a realization of 
their bearing upon routine decisions as to what the 
college programme should contain, who should give 
the instruction, and what the individual student 
should be directed or urged to study. Colleges should 
consider whether their students as a group are iso- 
lated, or whether groups within the whole are per- 
mitted to isolate themselves intellectually and socially 
even from their fellow-undergraduates. The problem 
as it affects the individual is not only what the boy 
does and feels, but what his environment keeps him 
from doing and feeling. 

This brings us back, after a somewhat lengthy 
departure, to the student himself and his part in 
the whole problem. He needs to realize, for example, 
that democracy may be helped but is not achieved 
when one calls a self-supporting boy by his first 
name, regardless of whether he plays on any team. 
It is, I am sure, the rare exception for an American 
imdergraduate to be other than firmly resolved to be 
democratic so far as economic status is concerned. The 
New York " Sun " has felt it necessary to plead for the 
right even of the deserving rich to get an education. 
The boys have more to learn regarding democracy 
between men of different sodal backgroimds. It is not 



354 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

enough to be cordial and even intimate with your 
guide in the woods or the bayman at the shore. How 
about the man in your class who wears the wrong kind 
of collars and shoes, or who uses the wrong kind of 
slang? Good form is an excellent thing to possess, but 
a very poor thing to worship. Some of the colleges 
where "nice" boys go might apply to themselves a 
recent criticism of Eton and Oxford: — 

In almost all who have been through them, they produce 
a worship of "good form," which is as destructive to life 
and thought as the mediaeval Church. "Good form" is 
quite compatible with superficial openmindedness, with 
readiness to hear all sides, with a certain urbanity toward 
opponents. But it is not compatible with fundamental open- 
mindedness, or with any inward readiness to give weight 
to the other side. Its essence is the assumption that what 
is most important is a certain kind of behavior: a behavior 
which minimizes friction between equals, and delicately 
impresses inferiors with a conviction of their own crudity. 

Finally, and this is most important of all for the 
future, the American student must appreciate the need 
of democracy in ideas. Let him work out his own con- 
victions for himself, but let him grant an equal right to 
his fellows. Tolerance after all is based upon "the 
recognition of the other man's right to be wrong." 

Having, with such success as the reader may accord, 
discouraged other critics, I shall now proceed to join 



CONCLUSION 355 

their ranks. My excuse is that most of them accuse all 
colleges impartially, while what I shall try to do is to 
point out to the majority what is already being ac- 
complished in the best institutions. Such matters as 
the closer relations between school below and the pro- 
fessions and industries above I have already dealt 
with, and also with the relative imimportance of rules 
and regulations as contrasted with personal knowledge 
of the boy, the relative importance of the ablest boys 
as contrasted with the mass, and the need of reform in 
grading systems and other machinery which at pres- 
ent tends to shake the student's confidence in the in- 
telligence of his guides. In considering admissions, I 
have tried to show the need to test plasticity in order 
to judge the possibility of growth as well as the pre- 
sent contents of the applicant's brain, and the need of 
asking of a given lad whether college training is the 
best training for him, and if so, whether our particular 
college is the one to which he should go. 

In considering the general administrative point of 
view, what the students and the pubKc call the Fac- 
ulty, we must admit a tendency toward the conserva- 
tism that is bom of isolation. Perhaps it is a relic of 
the old guild resentment of any pressure from outside, 
but at present it is shown in a lack of appreciation of 
what other educational agencies and even other col- 
leges are doing. How many professors, for example, 



356 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

have read the recent very careful report of under- 
graduate conditions at the University of Illinois and 
at how many places is the modern plan of working 
back from the product put into effect? How many col- 
leges have "studied their waste heaps'? They point 
with pride to distinguished alumni, but do they try to 
find why so many of their boys leave without gradua- 
tion? There is in general a lack of courage in testing 
things out. If we are so sure we are right, why not let 
the facts prove it? The impersonal tests of the work- 
ableness of our knowledge which are being developed 
by Thomdike and others are bringing this new point of 
view rapidly up through the elementary schools, to be 
faced in the colleges and professional institutions. 
There are lots of things which we don't know about our 
affairs which we could readily find out instead of wait- 
ing for the Carnegie or the Rockefeller Board to do so, 
and then resenting its intrusion. It is the college, for 
example, which is the last institution to recognize the 
educational advantage of the moving picture, while 
shop operatives and even the soldiers in the training 
camp are having the benefits of it. 

College legislation is likely to show not only over- 
conservatism, but a strange inelasticity. For example, 
a plan of organization whereby a city and a country 
college might cooperate in order to give the boys in 
each an experience both of city and country life would 



CONCLUSION 357 

seem to be reasonable enough, but is now quite im- 
possible of accomplishment. 

From the way in which the faculties met the emer- 
gency which was suddenly created by the war condi- 
tions of last spring, however, we may reasonably hope 
that in no respectable college will things go back to the 
conditions described, with a good deal of truth, it must 
be admitted, in the "New RepubHc" recently: — 

Fussy exactness is accepted for scholarship and lugubri- 
ous obscurity for erudition. Only the difference between 
the tweedledum and the tweedledee of curricula will stir 
up any rancor or heat. For although much of the prog- 
ress of educational theory and practice is due to college 
men, it is safe to say that discarded theories and practices 
hold sway longest in faculty gatherings. . . . The majority 
vote is almost always reactionary. "Formal discipline" 
is still worshiped idolatrously. . . . Freshmen are still re- 
garded as perverse youths who must on no account be 
allowed to study anything that is of vital interest to them, 
else they be "spoiled" for the hard restraint of pure 
scholarship. The conventional ending to these discussions 
is the expression of intense pessimism over our degenerate 
day. Faculties still dream of an academic golden age, in 
the past. 

In their deliberations there seem to me to be five 
fundamental questions which up to the present the 
colleges have dodged, generally with skill and success. 
First comes the relation of the college to student life. 
The present test has shown, if the lessons were needed, 



358 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

what part this life plays in the total product. Part of 
the formal record of a candidate for the flying corps, 
for example, has to do with his achievements in under- 
graduate life. It has shown also that the spirit of serv- 
ice which urges the boys into the trivial tasks of col- 
lege life can be turned to bigger things, and that the 
entrepreneur qualities which it often develops may be 
used for other than money-making callings. An in- 
telligent study of this question would have to recog- 
nize a definite conflict of interests, to avoid either the 
attitude of opposition of too many faculties, or the 
complaisance of too many deans, and should take ad- 
vantage of the passionate interests of students in 
social questions as the logical joint between the cur- 
riculum and the student life. 

Secondly, the faculties fail to consider their college 
programme as a whole. "There has been too little of 
the generous cooperation in a common cause which 
might be looked for. Each specialty has taken part in 
an ignoble scramble for a place at the overcrowded 
board. Teachers of literature have decried science, 
scientists have discouraged *mere literature'; lan- 
guage and mathematics have been at odds, and even 
the classics and the modern languages have fallen 
out." 

If the colleges studied the courses and their correla- 
tion, there would be far less of the wasteful duplication 



CONCLUSION 359 

which is now abnost the rule. They fail to take ad- 
vantage of the natural groupings of students to tie the 
work together and the chances oiBfered thereby to de- 
velop intellectual team play. This would seem to be 
an obvious plan, but such a proposal in the English 
classes at Harvard was deemed worthy of a special 
newspaper story not long ago. We see hopeful signs of 
a progressive development throughout the four years 
in the recent recommendations of President Meikle- 
john, for example, and in the honor courses being es- 
tablished here and there, but in general the student 
whose courses grow as his mind grows is a fortunate 
one. 

So far as the actual content of the curriculum is 
concerned, the college too often feels that its duty is 
done when it resists, as far as possible, professional 
and vocational subjects, and makes the boys work or 
seem to work reasonably hard at what is left. Should 
it not face the fact that there are certain things not 
now satisfactorily taught which will come, if at all, 
only upon its own initiative? For example, as a nation 
we are notoriously lacking in knowledge and apprecia- 
tion of the fine arts. Some colleges give courses in a 
half-hearted way in the history of music and painting 
— carefully repressing any production or performance 
on the part of the students, lest that would be lower- 
ing the college to the level of the conservatory or art 



36o THE UNDERGRADUATE 

school. Except at Harvard and a very few other 
places, we neglect the available opportunities to vital- 
ize these courses by the hearing of music or the seeing 
of pictures. The drama fares somewhat better because 
it happens also to be "literature"; but in general 
the whole field is waiting for an intelligent and reso- 
lute development by the colleges. 

Within the past twenty years the English depart- 
ments have made a great advance in written English 
(except the spelling of it), but how much has been done 
for carrying over the knowledge which the students 
possess into their written work in other fields — and 
how much in the decent speaking of the mother 
tongue? 

In foreign languages we are only just beginning to 
realize that we don't really know what we want to 
teach, that for the student who can spend only a year 
or so, it is better to teach him to read intelligently 
than to read, write, and speak atrociously. For those 
who can go farther, we are miles behind the South 
Americans in using the programme as a whole to ob- 
tain the requisite laboratory practice. There the stu- 
dent may study his physics or chemistry, for example, 
in French, English, or German, but so far as I know 
this has been tried here only at the University of 
Michigan. 

Education, which m its history and principles 



CONCLUSION 361 

forms one of the really great disciplines, and is just 
now one of the most dynamic of subjects, is too often 
regarded as something fit only for boys who want 
teachers' licenses to help them through the law school. 

Science has done more than perhaps anything else 
for the vitality and modernizing of our college course, 
but, like many another reformer in power, its sway is 
now too autocratic. Survey courses, without labora- 
tory training and designed to provide culture and in- 
formation as contrasted with preparation for the next 
higher course, are taboo. The honest fear of flabbiness 
blinds its votaries to the dangers of narrowness. No 
one will trust his neighbor to teach the history of sci- 
ence, or even to prepare to teach it, and the professors 
in the different fields join in pooh-poohing the right of 
their colleagues to seek out the relations between the 
teaching of scientific method and the teaching of the 
facts of science. I have no panacea to offer, but I do 
think that in this field again there is something for 
the college faculties to think through. 

Considering that the most popular distinction be- 
tween the college and the university is that the former 
is a teaching institution, mighty little interest or in- 
telligence is being devoted to securing good teaching. 
Even when interest is shown in unsatisfactory condi- 
tions, it is an interest in symptoms rather than in un- 
derlying causes. The whole problem is an intensely 



362 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

difficult one, but all the more reason for attacking it 
vigorously. It involves questions such as an atmos- 
phere of intellectual honesty, a broad versus sl nar- 
row departmental organization, good library facilities, 
etc., more than it does salaries and other economic 
conditions. The very efforts to improve conditions — 
as, for example, the unyielding requirement of formal 
preparation — are sometimes absurd in the face of 
obvious facts. The hanging committee does not ask 
an artist where he has studied before accepting his 
picture, but many a college fails to recognize first-class 
teaching because the teacher has no Ph.D. There is a 
lack of the realization that a college must have not 
only a good average of teachers, but some "head- 
liners," even though these latter are likely to have 
rough edges and angles, and sometimes to forget the 
need of young blood in the faculty, if only to give radi- 
cal opinion a chance. 

My fourth general criticism is that, under present 
conditions, a degree is too often what Dr. Bradley 
has called it — "an obstacle to educational progress." 
There is a notable lack of courage in withholding de- 
grees from men who patently don't deserve them, as if 
when a man had been permitted to remain in college 
during the allotted time, the institution owed him a 
degree. The burden of proof should, up to the last day, 
be on the student, and then the degree might be made 



CONCLUSION 363 

to mean something. There is, perhaps, some excuse 
for admitting mediocrity in the hope that it may turn 
out to be something better, but there is none for 
stamping it after four years of experience with official 
approval. As a matter of fact, we don't really know 
and we have n't thought out what we want the degree 
to stand for. For every student, the college should 
face the question of whether that particular boy 
should get its degree. This should be the final step in 
the individual treatment of the student, whereas at 
present it is a matter usually settled automatically by 
the accumulation of a certain number of records on 
the registration books. There is a corresponding ad- 
vantage on the other side. If the degree were not ex- 
pected as a matter of course, we could do more than 
we now do with the special student. I am inclined to 
think that experience would show that it is much eas- 
ier to maintain standards and what may be called the 
''personality" of a college by limiting its degrees than 
by elaborate policies of admission or removal. This 
has certainly been the experience abroad and in some 
of the best of our own technical schools. 

My fifth and final criticism of the college is as to the 
pace in intellectual matters which is usually main- 
tained, as compared to the pace which might safely be 
demanded. With a vigorous pace will come thorough- 
ness in the work done. Only in rare cases does this 



364 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

mean a change from idleness to industry. We hear of 
the drowsy college atmosphere, but I challenge my 
readers to find it. Our trouble is not drowsing but 
frittering. College students are notoriously lacking in 
the ordering of their time, and the colleges do very lit- 
tle to help them. Often, indeed, they set the boys a 
very bad example. One of the places where time is 
most wasted, and boredom creeps in both for teacher 
and student, is in the cumbersome and wasteful 
method of testing what the student has done. In the 
law schools this has reached a point where a student 
frequently does not know three months after the term 
has closed whether he has passed his courses. Some 
study of the Ebbinghaus tests and their recent devel- 
opments would be in order here. Too many teach- 
ers still dictate long tables of figures which should 
be multigraphed and handed about. Every adviser 
should be required to make a report as \o how each 
of his boys plans his day for study, and the freshman 
year, instead of being the special possession of the 
protected interests, should be primarily a period of ad- 
justment. There is a temptation to take the whole 
thing as a matter of course, particularly dangerous in 
the freshman year, when it is far from being a matter 
of course. The question of proper adjustment in this 
year is not alone important to the boy. It is equally 
important for the welfare of the college. Any one who 



CONCLUSION 365 

has suffered the harassing delays during which an 
Adirondack guide is adjusting the weight and bearing 
of his pack, and who then has marveled to see the 
man carry it without a rest for five miles, may well 
ponder whether there is not some lesson to be learned 
in this connection. 

Each boy should be studied as a case by himself and 
his load lightened by reducing the number of courses 
rather than by lowering the requirements of those he 
takes. It is often the most ambitious boy whose pro- 
gramme needs pruning, who does not realize the strain 
of the hard struggle upward, of inefficient nourish- 
ment and ever-present financial worry, and the brutal 
shock of constant readjustment between home and 
college conditions. If the conditions are right and the 
pack is properly adjusted, the conventional student 
attitude toward work is absurd. 

As a matter of fact, our work periods are probably 
the happiest of our fives. Leisure time poorly spent 
gives no rest. The testimony of men who have moved 
from one college to another goes to prove that there is 
more fun in the college of higher standards, and surely 
the busy man on a hofiday always has a better time 
than the idler in search of a new sensation. 

But the coUege administration cannot do these 
things alone: it needs help from the pubHc, and par- 



366 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

ticularly that special group of the public constituting 
the alumni; also from the parents, and, finally, from 
the boys themselves. The family responsibility, of 
course, goes back to the boy*s choice of parents and 
grandparents and concerns more directly the nursery, 
where many a college career has been foredoomed to 
failure. The influence of the parents on a boy's get- 
ting a good general preparation is not strong enough 
as a rule. A round-up scolding when bad reports come 
in is not the whole duty of a father. The parents 
should also pay more attention to the question of 
environment for their boys. By the time the son is 
ready to go to college, they should really know the 
boy — how he works best, whether in a small and 
more intimate, or in a larger and less intimate group. 
If possible they should guide the boy's own decision, 
rather than make it for him. Too many boys drift to 
college, and to some particular college. After careful 
consideration the decision might be the same, but the 
boy would go with a wholly different spirit. When 
once the decision is reached, the parents should really 
go into partnership in the enterprise. This cannot be 
done if the father expects the boy to come to the same 
conclusions as he himself has reached upon many 
questions; for he is not going to. Nor do I mean that 
they should take away from the boy the fun of find- 
ing things out for himself; but much of the lack of 



CONCLUSION 367 

proportion from which undergraduates suffer could be 
checked by a father who shows himself not hostile 
to, but interested in, student activities, as well as in 
scholarship. 

Finally, we must call in, more than has ever been 
the case in the past, one final factor — the student 
himself. It is not necessary to presuppose old heads 
upon young shoulders to get a good deal more help 
than we do at present. If the boys can once realize 
that their time in college is primarily an investment, 
and an expensive one, they can be made to see the rea- 
sonableness in doing their best work. The speed with 
which the young fellows who went into the training 
camps last spring mastered the compKcated drill and 
military technique in order to obtain a commission 
shows what youth can do if it has a definite goal viv- 
idly in sight. 

On the whole, the American college, if not all that 
the enthusiasts claim, may properly ask for the Scotch 
verdict of "not proven,** in the face of the charges 
brought against it. But this is not enough. In our in- 
stitutional Kfe its tactical position is none too secure, 
and if it is to be a permanent part of our scheme of 
things, it must justify something stronger than a nega- 
tive verdict. No other great nation includes this par- 
ticular item in its educational investment. The college 



368 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

does not exist on the Continent of Europe, and in 
England it is still a class investment rather than a na- 
tional one. Neither Japan nor the South American 
Republics have imitated it. 

Here at home the secondary schools are reaching up 
and the professional schools pressing down. Other 
enterprises, correspondence schools, charitable and 
social associations, business houses, the Army and 
Navy — all are entering the field of instruction which 
the college formerly held for its own. The establish- 
ment of professional schools of business, journalism, 
and social service is breaking down the distinction 
between liberal and vocational study, which, if illogi- 
cal, was at any rate a convenient way of indicating a 
field in which there were no academic trespassers. 

Under all these circumstances the college cannot 
expect permanently to play so large a part in our na- 
tional life as even its enemies admit that it now does, 
unless it really deserves to do so; if it fails, it will not 
be because the most generous financial support is no 
longer forthcoming. The war and the taxation inci- 
dent upon it may tighten the purse-strings tempora- 
rily, both as to public and private expenditure, but 
when the expenses due to our social mistakes — the 
asylums and institutions for the feeble-minded, for 
example — are reduced as they are sure to be, the 
provisions for normal humanity, colleges included, 



CONCLUSION 369 

will be correspondingly greater. If the verdict should 
be unfavorable, it will be because the college is no 
longer regarded as necessary, and its disappearance 
will not be a matter of the dim future. The war and 
its sequalae are sure to hasten all processes of change, 
and the recent history of Japan has shown us how 
profoundly every element of a civilization may be 
changed, without revolution, within the span of a 
man's life. Or, if we want an example at home, we 
have only to take the interests and occupations of 
our grandmothers, with their wax flowers and back- 
boards, and compare them with the activities of the 
girls of to-day. In these fast-moving days it would 
imply no social miracle if our colleges should disap- 
pear in a quarter of a century. It is good for us to real- 
ize this fact, not because we want it to happen, or be- 
cause we believe it will, but because the recognition of 
a real responsibility is useful as a deterrent against the 
sloth and complacency which attach themselves to all 
supposedly divinely ordained institutions. 

We must face the truth that there is, after all, no 
such thing as the American college. There are five or 
six hundred different American colleges, and the ma- 
jority of them do not deserve to be permanent. Per- 
haps half of this group might profitably become junior 
colleges. Of the stronger institutions there is not a 
single one which could not consider to advantage how 



370 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

its vigor and usefulness might not be strengthened by 
pruning here and developing there — by constant 
watchfulness against waste of time and effort, and by 
a clearer realization of the difference between its aims 
and those of the university and the vocational school. 
The colleges need more intelligent cooperation, not 
only with other agencies, but with one another. The 
public must be educated to regard the support of a 
bad college in money or sons as an anti-social act, and 
the public at large — not merely the college-bred pub- 
lic — must prepare its sons more thoroughly than is 
the case to-day to recognize the seriousness of the in- 
vestment which is involved in giving over these price- 
less years of youth. , 

What, after all, is the peculiar offering which justi- 
fies the good college in demanding its place in our 
complex and overcrowded scheme of things? Cer- 
tainly it is not the plan of organization nor the course 
as a thing in itself. It is, I think, the basic concep- 
tion of a group of young men living and working and 
thinking and dreaming together, free to let their 
thoughts and dreams determine the future for them. 
These young men, hourly learning much from one an- 
other, are brought into touch with the wisdom of the 
past, the circumstances of the present, and the visions 
of the future, by a group of older students, striving to 



■m 



CONCLUSION 371 

provide them with ideas rather than beliefs, and guid- 
ing them in observing for themselves nature's laws 
and human relationships. They are given in many 
fields, largely of their own choosing, opportunities — 
to quote President Eliot — "for exact observation, 
correct record, and just inference." 

As in a well-ordered laboratory course (which is 
really what the college is), the boys are spared from 
sterile or time-wasting experiments within their little 
world, with its trials, its triumphs, and its failures, so 
far as is possible; but they are no longer shielded from 
the world outside, though guided as to what is most 
worth while to learn from it. They have opportunities, 
in their own affairs, to learn team play, to take respon- 
sibility, and to develop leadership. 

The whole is conducted in that spirit of enthusiasm 
and gayety which alone can call out at their best the 
generous sympathies of youth. The dominant note of 
the little city is one of confidence and hope. "Hope," 
says Bertrand Russell, "not fear, is the creative prin- 
ciple in himian affairs. All that has made men great 
has sprung from the attempt to secure what is good, 
not from the struggle to avert what was thought evil. 
. . . Those who are taught in this spirit will be filled 
with life and hope and joy, able to bear their part in 
bringing to mankind a future less sombre than the past, 
with faith in the glory that human effort can create." 



372 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

The college, in short, gives an opportunity for youth 
to have a "preliminary canter," before entering the 
hard race of life, by which the whole group will be 
better prepared, not only for gaining a livelihood, but 
for usefulness to the community, and for the enjoy- 
ment and appreciation of the things of the mind and 
the spirit. Perhaps even more important, the excep- 
tional individual will almost certainly be recognized 
and be given the special grooming for his unique duty 
of pressing forward beyond our present confines. 

The pessimist may see little resemblance, even in 
the better colleges, between the picture I have tried to 
paint and the actual conditions as he observes them, 
but those who know them best and love them most 
will, I think, join me in believing that the picture has 
in itself a very considerable basis of actual reality and 
accomplishment. 

Far as the colleges have fallen short of their highest 
possibilities, we can nevertheless fairly ask ourselves 
whether, if the same proportion of the young men of 
Germany had received the training given in our col- 
leges, the German people would now be enduring a 
form of government which has made them to be out- 
casts on the face of the earth. And the college has a 
peculiarly vital place just now, for our own people. 
More than any other nation we have the problem of 
bringing unity and strength out of the most diverse of 



M 



CONCLUSION 373 

human materials. The Great War has shown, indeed, 
that the problem has been solved thus far, but has also 
shown how near, for large groups, it was to failure, 
so strong are the old ties of race and culture. The fu- 
ture will bring new difficulties. In the pioneering stage 
of any nation, the process of absorption is relatively 
easy; but we have passed that stage, and if the war 
closes before our economic resources have been 
drained, as have the resources of Europe, we may ex- 
pect a flood of immigration which will stretch even our 
elastic capacity to the utmost. This will come, fur- 
thermore, at a time when the himian race, as Josiah 
Royce wrote but shortly before his death, "will still be 
passing through one of its great crises, with new ideas, 
new issues — a new call for men to carry on the work 
of righteousness, of charity, of courage, of patience and 
of loyalty." We are, it should be said, in better shape 
to face the future and the sudden readjustments which 
the war will bring than would have been the case a few 
years ago. The waste of time is less, both within the 
classroom and throughout the year. There is closer 
supervision and better emphasis on the individual. 
The students are receiving training in responsibility, 
and a beginning is being made in the public mind in 
drawing a line between good and feeble institutions. 

The college, though purged of its excrescences, and 
strengthened as we hope to see it str^gthened, can be 



374 THE UNDERGRADUATE 

only one of many agencies to play a part in this great 
work, but its part will be not the least important. It 
can maintain and develop those qualities upon which 
we have built in the past, our essential democracy, 
our ingenuity and adaptability, our generosity and our 
hopefulness. With all its imperfections the American 
college has the great quality of vitality. It is plastic 
and dynamic. It provides, and can provide better as 
time goes on, an environment which will foster but not 
force the pushing and budding of the spirit of youth, a 
process blind at first, but growing in vision through 
the college years. 

To each individual, — your boy and mine, — as he 
comes to take his place in the company of imdergradu- 
ates, the good American college can give the chance 
to gain his own view of the great enterprise of life, and 
the part he is to play therein. 



THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



